[CHAPTER IX]
LA CABEZA DEL TIGRE
The Spanish adherents of Marshal Liniers, had done their best to excite enthusiasm for the cause of Spain, in the hearts of the citizens of the learned city of Cordova, a city of which it was said at that time, that even the waiters in the cafés talked Latin, and that the favourite amusement of the peons at the street-corners, was to discuss among themselves the most abstruse questions of philosophy and metaphysics.
Among other reports which were diligently circulated, was one that a great part of the troops in Buenos Aires had mutinied, and were on the march to join Marshal Liniers under the command of Don Roderigo Ponce de Leon, who had been appointed by Cisneros as his delegate in the provinces. The news of the skirmish on the Estancia Pico, in which these troops were stated to have been cut to pieces, consequently produced great consternation among these Spaniards, but made little impression upon the good citizens of Cordova, who for the most part heard of all these events with indifference, not considering matters of government to be any affair of theirs.
Marshal Liniers was better informed concerning the particulars of that skirmish. The aid he looked for was not from Buenos Aires but from Peru, yet still he lingered at Cordova, hoping to be joined by Don Roderigo, of whom he had heard nothing, save that he had left Buenos Aires for the purpose of joining him. So passed the month of July, his adherents falling away from him, till he lost all hope of making any effectual stand where he was against the patriot army.
Meantime the patriots had met with great difficulties on their march across the Pampas to Santa Fè, and it was already August when they ascended the high lands which surround the city of Cordova, marching with great precautions, for they knew not what resistance they might meet.
It was a fine morning, it seemed as though the spring had already come, the air was so balmy, the vegetation so luxuriant, when on the 5th August, Don Carlos Evaña with a troop of dragoons, which formed the advanced guard of the patriot army, debouched from the thick wood, and looked down upon the pleasant city of Cordova, snugly nestling among the hills in the valley below him; upon Cordova, the city of churches and convents, the city of monks and nuns, the city of learned doctors and of eager seekers after a knowledge void of all practical value; upon Cordova, a city of which no native was ever known to be in a hurry, and where men were well content to sleep away their lifetime, sheltered from the storms of nature by those encircling hills, sheltered from the storms of men by their ignorance of all those varied aspirations, which make life in other climes a never-ending race after prizes for ever vanishing away; upon Cordova, the peaceful and the learned, where Spain was thought of as the empress of the world, and where more was known of the history of Carlo-Magno and his Paladins than of that of Frederick the Great or of Napoleon, where the greatest war that the world had ever known was supposed to be the war against the Moors waged by Ferdinand the Catholic and his Queen.
Upon Cordova looked down from those wooded heights, the vanguard of the patriot army; upon Cordova looked down Don Carlos Evaña, a man to whom the learning of Cordova was but as an idle dream, a man in whose eyes its peacefulness was sloth, and its religion hypocrisy.