“It is long before the eye can learn to grasp his[72] full dimensions; all around him is rock and mountain, there is nothing to give scale. We are warned of this ... by the camera, for the lens will not look at so wide an angle.... Presently, as we peer over the parapet into the depths of the gulf below us, we realise that there is a man down there walking by the waterside, with a dog that seems to bark though we cannot hear the sound. Slowly our eyes measure the voussoir above which we are standing; it is a twelve-ton block of granite; and the huge vault with its eighty such voussoirs seems to widen and deepen beneath us as we gaze; for the brook that it spans is the river Tagus, whose waters have their source three hundred miles away.
“Thus hint by hint we have pieced together the astonishing conclusion that the span of each of the two great central arches is rather wider ... than the interior of the dome of St. Paul’s; and that the height of the railway lines above the Firth of Forth is twenty feet less than that of the road above the Tagus! What must the scene be like in winter, when the waters are foaming against the springer stones one hundred and forty feet above their summer level! How vast the strength of these massive piers which for eighteen hundred years have defied the fury of the floods!
“Where now is the great Via Lata that ran from Gades to Rome? Where are the famous cities which it threaded on the way? The vine and olive grow in the forum of Italica, and the Miracles of Mérida are a dwelling for the stork. But here at the wildest point of all its wild journey our eyes may still behold a memorial which nature has assailed in vain: ‘Pontem perpetui mansurum in sæcula mundi’;—the monument of Caius Julius Lacer, more enduring even than Wren’s.”[73]
Many persons believe that Wellington’s troops, in 1809, blew up one of the smaller arches, but this is untrue. The history of the ruined arch has been given by Larousse. It was cut on two occasions. In 1213 the Saracens destroyed it, and Charles the Fifth rebuilt it in 1543. Two hundred and sixty-five years passed, and then the French in 1808 were compelled by the policy of war to wreck the same arch, and I have already described how Wellington bridged the gap with a netting of ropes—a suspension bridge of ships’ cables—covered with planks ([p. 16]). This temporary work was displaced by a wooden arch, which in 1818 was burnt down; and between this date and the Carlist wars no restoration seems to have been attempted. “The Spaniards were long content with a ferry,” says Mr. Wigram. But now they have renewed the arch “in its native granite, a feat of which they are justly proud. Only, seeing that no cement at all was used in the original building, it was really a little too bad of them to insist upon pointing all the joints!” True; but the workmen were modern, not Roman, and it was humility on their part to advertise their cement, their most evident strength.
THE BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZA, PARTLY ROMAN
The Moorish words Al Kántarah mean THE BRIDGE, and we know that the Titanic masterpiece of Julius Lacer has but few rivals. Let us put it side by side with the most stately bridges at Isfahan in Persia, whose august charm is not so masculine ([p. 268]); then we do honour to the finest pontine architecture in the world. The Alcántara is a King, a Cæsar, while the two Persian achievements are Amazon Queens.
Several bridges in Spain have the honorary title of being Roman, either because they exhibit a combination of Roman and Moorish masonry like the sixteen-arched example at Córdova, or because they may have in them some Roman workmanship, like the Puente de Piedra over the Ebro at Zaragoza, which has seven arches and six very massive piers, far too ungainly to be Roman. Indeed this bridge dates from 1437, but it was built on a classical site, and on Roman foundations. Some houses give interest to the upstream side of the piers, but their roofs do not rise above the level of the parapet.
As for the bridge over the Guadalquivir at Córdova, it is more Moorish than Roman, for most of the Roman arches were destroyed by the eighth century, and they were reconstructed by the Arabs, who established themselves at Córdova in 711. Recently this bridge has been so much repaired that it looks almost new. A big tower, very Moorish in style, the Calahorra, keeps guard at the end remote from the town; and the city entrance has a worn classic gateway and an elevated statue of Saint Raphael, the patron saint of Córdova.