Like Cadiz, Gibraltar, situated on a peninsula at the entrance of a gulf, is only connected with the continent by a narrow strip of land called the Neutral Ground, where the custom-house lines are established. The first Spanish possession on this side is San Roque. Algeciras, whose white houses glisten in the universal azure, like the silvery stomach of a fish floating on the surface of the water, is exactly opposite Gibraltar; in the midst of this splendid blue, Algeciras was having its little revolution. We heard indistinctly the popping report of fire-arms, like the noise made by grains of salt when thrown into the fire. The ayuntamiento even took refuge on board the steamer, and began smoking cigars in the most tranquil manner in the world.
The officers of health not having found that we brought any infectious disease with us, we were surrounded by small boats, and, in another quarter-of-an-hour, we were on shore. The effect produced by the appearance of the town is the strangest it is possible to conceive. By taking one step, you have your five hundred leagues, which is rather more than even Tom Thumb did in his famous boots. Just now you were in Andalusia, at the next moment you are in England. From the Moorish towns of Granada and Murcia, you suddenly alight at Ramsgate: you see brick-houses with their areas, their low doors, and their English windows, exactly like those at Twickenham or Richmond. If you go a little further, you will perceive cottages with their painted railings and gates. The public walks are planted with ash and birch trees, with elms and the green vegetation of the north, so different from those small plates of varnished metal which pass for foliage in southern climates. Englishmen have so strong an individuality that they are everywhere the same, and I really cannot understand why they travel, for they carry all their customs with them, and bear their houses on their backs exactly like snails. Wherever an Englishman may be, he lives precisely as he would do in London; he must have his tea, his rumpsteaks, his rhubarb pies, his porter, and his sherry, if he is well; and his calomel, if he is ill. By means of the innumerable packages he lugs about with him, the Englishman always enjoys his home and his comfort, which are necessary to his existence. How many objects do our insular neighbours require in order to live—how much trouble do they give themselves to feel at their ease?—and how much do I prefer to all this complicated array, Spanish abstemiousness and privation! It was a very long time since I had seen a female with one of those horrible coal-scuttle affairs, one of those odious pasteboard cases covered with a slip of stuff, and called bonnets, in which the fair sex bury their faces, in so-styled civilized countries. I cannot express the disagreeable sensation I experienced at the sight of the first Englishwoman I met, with a bonnet and a green veil on her head; I seemed, all at once, to be placed face to face with the spectre of civilization, that mortal enemy of mine, and this apparition struck me as a sort of warning that my dream of vagabond liberty was at an end, and that I should soon be obliged once more to re-enter the mode of life of the nineteenth century, never to leave it again. Before this Englishwoman, I felt quite ashamed of having neither white kid gloves, eye-glass, nor patent leather shoes, and I cast an embarrassed glance on the extravagant embroidery of my sky-blue mantle. For the first time during six months, I felt that I was not presentable, and that I did not look like a gentleman.
At Gibraltar, which has become heretic since the English occupy it, there are a great number of Jews, who have either been driven away, or looked on with an evil eye by the Spanish, who, if they have no more religion, still possess superstition. They walk about the streets, displaying their hooked noses, thin lips, and yellow, polished foreheads surmounted by rabbinical caps, placed on the back of the head, and their threadbare, narrow, sombre-coloured robes. The Jewesses, who, by a singular privilege, are as beautiful as their husbands are hideous, wear picturesque black cloaks, bordered with scarlet and having hoods. Their appearance caused us to think vaguely of the Bible, of Rachel at the well, and the primitive scenes of the time of the patriarchs, for, like the women of all oriental races, they still preserve in their long black eyes and the golden tints of their complexions, the mysterious reflexion of a world that has now disappeared. There are, also, at Gibraltar, a great many natives of Morocco, as well as Arabs from Tangiers and the places along the coast: they have little shops, where they sell perfumery, silk sashes, slippers, fly-flappers, ornamented leathern cushions, and other knick-knacks of barbarous industry. As we wished to purchase a few trifles and curiosities, we were conducted to one of the principal dealers, who lived in the upper part of the town. We had to pass through a number of streets like staircases, which were less English in their character than the streets in the lower part of the town, and whence, at certain turnings, our eye glanced over the gulf of Algeciras, which was magnificently illuminated by the last rays of daylight. On entering the Morocco merchant's house, we were enveloped in a cloud of oriental perfumes: the sweet, penetrating odour of rose-water greeted our olfactory organs and made us think of the mysteries of the harem and the marvels of the Thousand-and-One Nights. The merchant's sons, two fine young men about twenty years of age, were seated on benches near the door, enjoying the coolness of the evening. They possessed that purity of features, that limpidity of look, that careless nobleness, and that air of amorous and pensive melancholy which belong to pure races. Their father had the grave, majestic look of a Magian king. We considered ourselves very ugly and mean-looking by the side of this solemn personage; and it was in the most humble tone, with hat in hand, that we asked him if he would deign to sell us a few pairs of yellow morocco slippers. He nodded affirmatively, and, on our observing that the price was rather high, he replied in Spanish, with great grandeur, "I never overcharge; such practices are only good for Christians." Thus our want of loyalty in commercial transactions renders us an object of contempt in the eyes of barbarous nations, who cannot understand that a man will perjure himself, in order to make a farthing or two more.
Having made our purchases, we went down again to the lower part of the rock, and took a stroll along a fine promenade planted with trees of northern climes, intermixed with flowers, sentinels, and guns, and where you meet with broughams and horsemen just as you do in Hyde Park. All that is wanting there is the statue of Achilles Wellington. This promenade is outside the town, at Europa Point, in the direction of the mountain inhabited by the monkeys. This is the only spot in Europe where these amiable quadrumanes live and multiply in a savage state. According as the wind changes, they pass from one side of the rock to the other, and thus serve as a barometer: every one is forbidden to kill them under very heavy penalties. As for myself, I saw none; but the temperature of the place is hot enough to allow the most chilly macacuses and cercopithecuses to fully develop themselves, without fires or air-stoves. Abyla, if we can believe its modern name, must delight, on the coast of Africa, in a similar population.
The next day we left this park of artillery and land of smuggling, to be wafted towards Malaga, with which place we were already acquainted, but which we had great pleasure in again beholding, with its white, slender lighthouse, and its harbour full of perpetual movement. Viewed from the sea, the cathedral looks larger than the town, and the ruins of the ancient Arab fortifications impart to the sloping rocks a most romantic effect. We returned to our inn of the Three Kings, and the pretty Dolores uttered a cry of joy on recognising us.
The next day we again embarked with a cargo of raisins; and, as we had lost some time, the captain resolved to pass by Ameria, and to go direct to Cartagena.
We kept close enough to the coast of Spain never to lose sight of it; but the coast of Africa had, in consequence of the widening of the Mediterranean, long since disappeared from the horizon. On one side, therefore, our view consisted of long rows of bluish cliffs, with curiously-formed steeps, full of perpendicular cracks, and marked, here and there, with white spots, announcing the presence of a little village, a watch-tower, or a custom-house officer's hut; and, on the other, of the boundless sea, now ruffled and goffered by the breeze or tide, now of a dull blue and dead colour, or as transparent as crystal, and then brilliant and undulating, like the basquina of a dancing-girl, while at other times it was opaque, oily, and as grey as mercury or melted lead; forming altogether a variety of tones, and assuming such various aspects as would throw any poet or painter into utter despair. A procession of red, white, and other light-coloured sails, of ships of every size and nation, enlivened the scene, and took away that melancholy which ever attends infinite solitude. A sea in which no sail is visible, is the most sad and dispiriting spectacle that any one can well behold. Fancy not one thought on so large an extent of space, not one soul to comprehend all the sublimity contained therein! And yet, only place one white and almost imperceptible speck on this fathomless and unbounded main, and its immensity will be peopled; it will then contain an interest, a drama.
Cartagena, which is called Cartagena de Levante, to distinguish it from Cartagena in America, is situated at the end of a bay, a sort of funnel of rocks, where ships find complete shelter from every wind. Its form has nothing picturesque about it; the deepest impressions produced on us there were made by two windmills, decorated with black drawings on a light sky-blue ground.
The aspect of Cartagena differs entirely from that of Malaga. Buried in its crown of bare and sterile rocks, which are as dry as the Egyptian hills of the ancient Pharaohs, Cartagena is as dull and grim as Malaga is gay, cheerful, and animated. You no longer see whitewashed walls, for they are all dark-coloured, and the windows are grated with a complication of iron-work; while the houses, still more ill-looking, possess that prison-like appearance which distinguishes all Castilian mansions. Yet, as we do not wish to fall into the error of that traveller who wrote in his note-book, "All the women at Calais are cross, red-haired, and hump-backed," because the landlady of his inn united in herself these three defects, we must own that we perceived at these barred windows none but charming features and angelic faces: it is perhaps on this account that they are grated so carefully. While waiting for dinner, we went to visit the naval arsenal, an establishment of the grandest proportions, but at present in a state of grievous dilapidation; its vast basins, its stocks and idle dockyards, in which another armada might be built, are used for nothing now. Two or three half-constructed hulls, looking like the stranded skeletons of so many cachelots, are rotting unheeded in a corner; thousands of crickets have taken possession of those large deserted vessels, and you cannot make a step without crushing some of them; the noise they make, too, with their little rattles, is so great, that you can hardly hear yourself speak. In spite of the love I profess to have for crickets, love which I have expressed both in prose and verse, I must frankly own that here there were somewhat too many for me.
From Cartagena, we went as far as the town of Alicant, of which I had mentally formed, from a verse in the Orientale of Victor Hugo, a much too denticulated sketch: