+ ~ -
 
Please report pronunciation problems here. Select and sample other voices. Options Pause Play
 
Report an Error
Go!
 
Go!
 
TOC
 

legend, as we sit and listen at night under
the illuminated clock, to the stormy, blatant
military music, which makes up by marrow-
bone-and-cleaver violence, for what it wants
in thought, tenderness, or genius. And
while I think over these things, and compare
San Antonio to Cockspur Street King George,
who never does anything like that, I am
suddenly found out as an Englishman,
by a picaroon boy, who lets out chairs and
sells fusees; having found this out, he sees
no reason why I should pass unnoticed and
ungreeted (he has only one shoe and carries
a tin pot for his money), he comes round to
the back of my bench, grins at me, and says:
"Inglis, God dam! I Inglis. How you
do, sar? Very well thank you? All right:
good nightyou give me? Tank youhow
you doall right? Good-by, sar."

Before I get well rid of this little human
flea, I am accosted by a neatly-dressed fellow,
in white trousers and black serge great coat.
He begins by following me close, slowly
creeping to my left side, then ostentatiously
allowing me to pass; then watching my eyes,
that turn to a list of voters pasted up at the
post-office door; then, as if I had asked him
something, saying in good broken English,
nodding, and showing his teeth, as I turn
round:

'I knowI am Inglis. Born at Geeberalter,
sar. Very good man, father, sar: very
spectable man father, sar. Had ten
children, sar. O very good Christian man, sar.
He die, sar; mother die, sar; leave me all
children to subsist on. Have saretificate,
sar, here. You kind charitè full of; very
full of, sare. Give me money, I go back to
Geeberalter, sarper l'amor de Diosfor
Goddes sake! I spit blood, sar " (here
coughs violently, which is partly accounted
for by a van of street sweepers, with broad
cane brooms, approaching us, veiled in clouds
of dust).

I look at the certificate, and find that it
declares that Balthazar de Barbate has
suffered very much, has by ill events quite
lost his respectability, and is now very
ill-conditioned, with a pulmonary chest. I
think the fellow has deserved something for
following me through six streets, and, to my
great  subsequent regretas I am immediately
after warned against himI give him a
quarter-dollar.

But Cadiz has other scenes than its fine
central street of green and gilt balconies,
merchants look-out towers, pierced doors, and
pillared courts where the silver of the fountain
seems always trying to leap itself up
into the semblance of twenty pounds worth
of change, and its gardens square broad and
spacious, and fit for mantilla'd ladies, armed
with black fans and eyes that stab you
through and through. There are long defiles
of pleasant streets, where open air store
shops try and attract you with rusty
carbines old as tha age of Cortes, dinted powder-
horns, rows of scallop shell castanets, tinsel
fans, broad bead combs, golden-brown-strings
of dried flakey fish, old shoes, necklaces,
relics, and rosaries. Here the seamen drink
aniseed and fire-water, and utter their
vehement beliefs, and here country girls stop and
barter and gossip. I venture through
Carthaginian named passes, where no carts go,
and mules seem never to trot, clink, and
clatter, to wide wastes, out by the ramparts,
where the sea moans and complains because
it cannot swallow the earth, as it wants to,
and is only allowed to gnaw and nibble at
the cliff and shore.

Perhaps I will break out by some stranded
looking store-houses, or deserted barracks,
and come to the bull-ring, which the sea
has undermined, and which will never more
be safe. See the great brown Windsor stone
heaps, the piles of rubbish in the crumbling
amphitheatre, where bulls and men have bled,
within sound of the great suffering moan of
the sea, that has always, be it storm or calm,
that great settled sorrow at its big heart;
that dreadful dream of the Deluge; that
complaint of its imprisoned genii.

It is in these sea-ward parts of the city,
where the black lava-like Mediterranean dust
which forms the road lies in great sifted
heaps up against the stone heaps of the
deserted bull-ring, inside the circus, no longer
crimson with bull's blood or the gore of
the bronze-faced men, that you come to dreadful
Spanish rookeries, where ghastly bearded
ruffians, smoking in half-naked sprawling
groups, scowl at you from the open doors,
and where hideous leering women, in puffing
white dresses, their black horsehair-looking
tresses, folded and looped with gold and
pearl, greet you with siren whispers from
under the shadowy twilight of the tent-like
matting that trails over the baclony,
or from the interstice of some coloured
curtain that sweeps down over the mysterious
window. It is in the "slums" and behind-
the-scenes world of Cadizunder these
whispering windows, which seem innumerable,
and beside these ruffian-guarded thieves'-
densthat the strange motley masquerade
of Spanish low life meets the Englishman's
astonished eye. It is not on the four miles
of sea ramparts, with the fire-tipped
lighthouses and fire-breathing forts, with their
portly priests, tinsel soldiers, fantastic dandies,
and ladies who seem to float on air or
walk on cloudsthat the traveller is to
obtain his true notion of Spanish life. No:
it is in the rows of naked-legged fishers
for red mullets, who angle all day with
thier long cane rodstheir backs to the
fashionable promenaderswith a patience
which has become proverbial, and who
mutter prayers and talismanic adjurations to
lure their dinner from the great, full-blooded
teeming sea: it is in the blind guitar-player,
whom the sweet-eyed child leads every morning
to the door of the Academia de Nobles