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IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
All Rights Reserved
CiNTRA — The Summer Palace of the King of Portugal.
' IN THE
TRACK OF THE MOORS
SKETCHES IN SPAIN AND NORTHERN AFRICA
BY
SYBIL FITZGERALD
WITH 63 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
AND MANY DRAWINGS
IN THE TEXT BY
AUGUSTINE
FITZGERALD
LONDON
J. M. DENT & COMPANY
NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.
1905
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Errata to "In the Track of the Moors"
1 Page 8, line 22. Read Zuloag^ for Zuloago
/Page 12, line 14. Read Zuloag<7 for Zuloag<?
2 iPage 12, line 16 of poem. Read dispised for dispised
^Page 12, line 20 of poem. Read disguised for disguised
3 Page 22. Read Echegare^y for Echegarez
4 Page 32. Read Demog/Vo for Demog/V<?
5 Page T^'^, last line of poem. Read heureu^r for heureuxj
6 Page ^J, line 9. Re2id full stop after the word "distroyed^''
7 Page 133, line 22. Ke Ad inverted commas :iher ^^ last ^^
8 Page 188, line 7. Read /><7i//Vr/o for pistachio
[Page 193, line 8. Ke^d balo-ing for hallooing
^ [Page 193, line 9. Read in inverted commas "lone desert bird that wears the
ruff"
10 Chapter 9. Read Tangier for Tangiers
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN ....
II. ANDALUSIA ......
III. GRANADA ......
IV. ORIGINS OF MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN
V. THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN .
VI. ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO
VII. WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS
VIII. IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM .
IX. MOROCCO ......
X. ALGERIA
XI. TUNISIA . .
XII. SANDS OF THE DESERT ....
19
37
55
73
89
105
121
137
149
167
185
488501
TlON
LIST OF COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS
CINTRA THE SUMMER PALACE OF THE KING OF PORTUGAL Frontispiece
SUNSET AT TOLEDO
TOLEDO — PUERTA DEL SOL .
A STREET IN TOLEDO
TOLEDO — A STREET SCENE .
A PALM GROVE IN MURCIA
RONDA A SCENE IN THE PLAZA
ON THE HIGH ROAD, RONDA
SPANISH GIPSY DANCING THE TANGA
THE COURT OF THE LIONS, THE ALHAMBRA
GATEWAY IN THE GENERALIF^ GARDENS, GRANADA
AN ARCADE IN THE GENERALIFE, GRANADA
THE COURT OF THE MYRTLES, THE ALHAMBRA .
HALL OF THE AMBASSADORS, THE ALHAMBRA
IN CORDOVA CATHEDRAL .....
WINDOW OF THE CAPTIVE's TOWER, THE ALHAMBRA
THE CASTLE OF AMOUREL ON THE TAGUS, PORTUGAL
TOWER OF SAN VINCENTE AT BELEM, LISBON
IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE
A GATE IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE
FOUNTAIN IN THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE
THE CANAL IN THE GARDEN OF THE GENERALIFE, GRANADA
ARCHITECTURA VERDE, GENERALIF^ GARDENS, GRANADA
IN THE GARDEN OF THE GENERALIFE, GRANADA
COURT OF LINDARAXA, THE ALHAMBRA
GATE OF THE TWO SISTERS, THE ALHAMBRA
ENTRANCE TO THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, ALGIERS
COURTYARD OF THE BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, ALGIERS
THE ARCHEVicHE, ALGIERS .....
COURTYARD OF THE BARDO, ALGIERS
A STREET IN ALMERIA ......
Facing 3
6
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9
16
19
22
25
32
40
43
46
49
52
59
62
67
70
73
75
78
80
«3
85
86
89
91
94
99
102
107
VIU
LIST OF COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS
ALGECIRAS .......
A ROAD IN GIBRALTAR .....
VIEW OF TANGIERS FROM THE BEACH
GATE IN THE OLD TOWN WALL, TANGIERS .
A MARABOUT NEAR TANGIERS ....
ENTRANCE TO THE SULTAN's PALACE, TANGIERS .
THE GREAT MOSQUE, TANGIERS ....
A STREET IN TANGIERS .....
THE MINARET OF THE GREAT MOSQUE OF TANGIERS
THE PRISON AT TANGIERS .....
TANGIERS FROM THE MARKET PLACE .
IN THE JEWISH QUARTER, TANGIERS .
COURTYARD AND FOUNTAIN OF THE GREAT MOSQUE, ALGIERS
THE MEDERSA, ALGIERS .....
VIEW OF ALGIERS FROM MUSTAPHA SUPERIEUR .
ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE OF SIDI, ABD-ER-RAHMAN
VILLA DJENAN EL MUFTI, ALGIERS
VILLA CAID MOHAMED, THE RESIDENCE OF MR HAY NEW
TON, CONSUL-GENERAL AT ALGIERS
A STREET IN TUNIS .......
DOORWAY OF THE GREAT MOSQUE, TUNIS .
MOSQUE DOMES AT TUNIS ......
ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN
THE MITHAB IN THE MOSQUE OF SIDI OKBA, KAIROWAN
TOWN GATEWAY, KAIROWAN
SUNSET AT KAIROWAN ....
A STREET IN BISKRA .....
THE MARKET PLACE, BISKRA
THE HORSE OF THE BASH AGA, BISKRA
THE DESERT NEAR BISKRA ....
A STREET IN BISKRA .....
THE PALANQUIN OF THE BASH AGA, BISKRA
BISKRA — AULAD-NAILS WOMEN MAKING HENNA WASH
Facing
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IN THE
TRACK OF THE MOORS
CHAPTER I
Impressions of Spain
" Je ne sais pas de pays oh. la vie ait autant de saveur." — Barr^s.
It is not as easy to enjoy Spain with idle pleasure as it is
for the wanderer through Italy. Many a thought or question
rises to disturb the surface curiosity in confronting for the first
time this strange and, in its least hackneyed sense, romantic
country. The legendic past, the rugged mystery of a dozen
centuries ago, these may well be forgotten, and the field yet
remain too vast. Coming for the first time into this once
elastic land, meeting for the first time in their own streets the
types which have changed so little since the great master painted
and purchased for his melancholy king the glories of the Prado,
the feeling of familiarity with an age which should have long
disappeared seems out of place in our time. It is in us rather
than in the scene of to-day, in the out-of-date legends and
associations which still crowd about this land, for Madrid itself
is the most modern town in the world and the Spanish people,
in spite of Taine's verdict on the Spain of Madame d'Aulnoy's
time, are the only people who, however profound or superficial
their decline has been, have outlived the word decadence. Were
it for this reason alone, the country's future oughi to be assured.
•;^:i : //. 1 JN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
but in witnessing Spain from the very midst of its strongly-
marked types and illusive history, the words of Taine seem
doubly true ; " La racine des grands evenements est toujours un
caract^re de peuple et I'histoire se ramene a la psycologie."
It is from no false sentiment that Spain seems still peopled
with the creations of poets, the romantic heroes of the stage ;
with the chivalrous Cid, with Gil Bias, with Victor Hugo's
idealism or Byron's wild imagination. More than in any other
country has an imaginary type been built up in Spain through
literature, and the Spaniards themselves were the first to
encourage in their drama an exalted rather than realistic language,
an inflated idealism and overstrained heroism which gave to their
stage at once so characteristic and stilted an atmosphere. So,
when the " Michael Ange de la France " caught his magnificent
inspiration from their school, he carried into his own imaginary
creations something of the moral inflation popularised by the
Spanish dramatists rather than of the genuine qualities of
the people ; for the Spaniards, even of Louis XIV. 's time, when
the Castilian language was a common accomplishment and
everything Spanish was the rage in France, were still an
unknown quantity, reserved and proud beings with farcical
shadows.
So from Corneille's day on, the Spaniard as he really is has
never been typified by foreign genius, even during that period
of the last century when all the literary life of France seemed
stirred anew by the stimulation of a vanished Spanish age, and
when every poet sought to breathe into his poetry its proud
atmosphere mingled with something of the old troubadour
romance softened by far-ofl^ recollection. His pride, his gloom,
his profound reserve, his bombastic courage and love of splendour,
conspire to make him in literature a hero of imagination, and
the first visit to Spain must bring with it a certain disillusion
though it cannot disappoint. Far from that ; nothing in Spain
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 3
ever disappoints. All stimulates to new ideas when the old
associations clung to through traditions and glowing pages are
lost.
The Spanish belong to a race that, however fallen its place
among nations, has always inspired genius — a vital secret of life
that makes of its decay a mysterious agent in the workings of the
mind. Much of this power of stirring the intellectual imagina-
tion of other lands comes from Spain itself, however, rather than
from the people. The Spaniard is exalted by the peculiar scenery
of his country, a scenery profoundly stimulating and in which
he is framed darkly against the sky '* like the cedar, patient of
heat and cold, nourished on little, lofty and dark, unbending
and incorruptible." It is in the landscape that lies hidden the
great soul of the past, for did it not seem too crude a paradox,
one might almost declare that the Spanish people themselves had
never been great in the true sense, in spite of the century during
which their territory stretched from the new world to the
Netherlands. Can greatness express itself through pure
fanaticism, through crusades carried out so fanatically that at the
end of a century and a half Spain fell prostrate at the feet of
Europe ? ' And for what ? For a religion that was surely
gaining ground in their country and must inevitably have
triumphed without the shedding of blood. That such a people
in such a country should justify for long their so-called
" decline," seems curiously absurd ; but until within our own
time, if we sift apart Jewish and foreign influences, a profound
indifference is found to the ideals that build up a fine nation by
its own merits, or rather by its own pronounced tastes. The
great men of Spain detach themselves with startling distinctness
from their own race like stars from the night ; and the immense
growth of the country in the sixteenth century was as the out-
come of the sway of magnificent sovereigns, those most splendid
^ Taine,
4 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
kings whom, it is said, are made by the most wretched nations.
The savage determination with which the religious struggle was
carried on showed less of growth and progress in the race than
the first symptoms of that extraordinary fanaticism which the
Moors had undoubtedly imparted to the people they had
conquered. Power in Spain extended more largely through
individual ambition than through patriotic unity, and it required
a monarch as bigoted and as determined as was Mohamed, a
fanatical centralisator of authority, a military prophet whose
army was foreign and whose famous fleet largely Genoese, to
invade countries and wear his successes like borrowed jewels in a
hollow crown while his people starved and their coffers stood
empty. However interested the individual, or corrupt the
government, the people have always conspired with, rather
than against it ; with the building up of Empire rather than the
building up of internal Spain, and few in the past have had the
courage to say —
"Sir, no prince
Shall ruin Spain, and least of all her own."
Nevertheless the Spaniard of no age is likely to admit that his
country's empire-building was the cause of its decline. Rather
has he continued to say : " From the time that we adopted a
French family and French principles we began to decay ; and it
is in vain that purblind politicians seek the germs of our corrup-
tion in America. Let us rather look to that country for re-
generation ; there the Spaniard shoots up again ; there we
perhaps may lay our bones at last." But even this last chance is
gone, and unburdened now of her Colonies, governed at last by
a patriotic sovereign, Spain can turn to her economic future with
untrammelled hands, and — though the question is still an open
one — may not find herself wanting. But this new life is but of
yesterday ; a prosperous regency, a purified court, and an opened-
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 5
up country of some thirty years is insufficient to change the
languid characteristics of so tired a race, and to cure ills that the
dust of ages still hides. A coup-d'ceil of Spain remains in all
justice what it was fifty years ago, and as the character of this
arid peninsula differs from that of the lands to the east of him,
the Spaniard himself seems cut off from certain traits broadly
common to the rest of Europe. The vast tracts of his sunburnt
land sparsely populated and stretching with wild savagery from
the fastnesses of the Pyrenees seems to have divided his nature
from the social warmth of intercourse such as in other countries
of Europe palpably transforms a land as the years pass, so
that France, Germany, or Italy of to-day would be scarcely re-
cognisable to the eyes of a century ago. But since in the
seventeenth century the Moriscos were finally expelled and
the fertile land so long kept turned^began to harden once more,
the Spaniard has remained self-centred and unprogressive. There
are many who firmly believe that Spain is but dormant and its
energies still warm ; that it is still the land of possibilities and
its people full of promise ; but this wave of latent life is only
found in the North where the strong breezes of another country
penetrate. Nothing can be imagined more self-centred within
the gloom of pride and narrow interest than the Andalusians and
even the Castilians of certain parts of Castile. They exhibit,
in fact, all the characteristics of Northern Africa, of the
stagnating life of the Moors, without the " blessing " of Islam.
There seems to be in the southern Spaniard a hopeless tendency
to procrastination, and this " thief of time " has set his seal
fatally on Spain, exhausted by fruitless colonial enterprises and
indisposed to learn lessons of any schoolmaster— even of that
greatest teacher of all — War. Manana is responsible for a curious
inattention to matters in hand, and even in the Spanish Cortes a
cultivated and gifted orator will often entertain the House at
length upon some subject singularly remote from the bill under
6 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
discussion. Perfect form, happy quotations from the classics,
and all the academic jewels of rhetoric, combine to give a
polished solemnity to the debate, but of any connection between
the speech and the question before the House there is none.
Irrelevancy is one of the intellectual aspects of the race, the
Andalusian in particular, and inability to see the obvious, an
indisposition to grasp the matter in hand.
After the terrible struggle of the Cross with the still
brilliant Crescent, and the underlying duel between the solid
home life, the monogamy and strength of family blood ties
against polygamy and Oriental languor, it is curious to note in
what spirit the success and splendour, the victorious glory in
which Spain then revelled, was interpreted. Unlike the Moors
of Moorish greatness, the Spaniards showed no capacity for
enjoying the fairer side of their success, the happy sunshine of
culture which had so distinguished their African masters. On
the contrary, a latent jealousy underlay their letters and art, impart-
ing to them an otherwise unexplainable satire. The Spaniards of
the North continued to carry on half unconsciously the eternal
struggle of the Castilians against the " Moors" and the enchant-
ment of Andalusia with the almost racial jealousy of the North
for the South, from which all Castilian learning and culture had
come. This total lack of the joyfulness of life, this racial gloom
of spirit which still underlies the Spanish character and imparts
itself to the most casual observer, has made of Spanish story
since the fifteenth century a picture at once too magnificent and
too terrible to attract the sympathies of the nineteenth. The
gloom of history is ingrained in the people still, and from their
great past they have brought none of the softness of Italian
poetry, or the calm of philosophy, which veiled the corruption
of the Renaissance and still casts such a halo over the land of
Dante. Indeed, the contrast between these two wonderful
countries is so remarkable that it must lie not only in the
Toledo— PuERTA del Sol.
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 7
countries themselves and their histories, but in the capacity for
the enjoyment of life in the people. Whereas in Italy we find
alongside with intellectual prosperity a contagious warmth and
sunshine, in Spain we see its great day overshadowed by that
curious gloom which confronted the Moors from the first, but
never contaminated them. Certain it is that until this gloom
of Spain was coloured by a growing enthusiasm for the age of the
Moors and of their arts, followed by the belief that the tide was
turning, and if not greatness as a nation, at least decided
enlightenment was at hand, it remained too stern in sentiment
to attract for pleasure only.
What it sprang from, this strange mental darkness, when and
how the '* amiga de noche" poisoned the people's blood and made of
their most splendid age one of unmeasured tristesse^ are questions
as elusive as is the psychology of the Moors themselves. As far
back as the days of Titus Levi and of Strabo they were "clothed
in black," stoically silent, obstinate, unsociable and contemptuous
of death. It was already, in fact, long ingrained in the race when
the Arabs invaded Spain, and the words of the poet-king of
Cordova bear witness to it with Oriental contempt :
" For the poor Christians the gloomy monasteries ; for our-
selves let us keep the gardens, the harem, the baths and assembly
halls rich with jasper and glittering stucco formed of hyacinths
and illuminated by ever-burning lamps. For them the obscure
cloisters, for us the fountains of silver and shady orange trees.
For them the privations of a fortress life, for us the tranquil and
soft existence of our pleasant palaces and smiling haunts. For
them intolerant tyranny, for us a mild monarchy ; for them
the ignorant ambitions of the people, for us the arts ; for them
abstinence and martyrdom ; but let us enjoy the delights of
friendship and of love in the fertile fields of beautiful Andalusia."
In these words lie the keynote to the Moorish and Andalusian
characters, and we wonder how the Moors ever succeeded in
8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
taking so firm a root In Spain If, as some think, there must ever
be some common sympathy between a conquering and a con-
quered people, to hold them together.
We, too, of to-day, must turn to these Moorish spots, the
alcazars, the old haunts, the gardens of Andalusia, In fact to
wherever the Mohamedans lingered, if we would feel the artistic
sunshine of Spain. It Is not found In Gothic Spain, nor, so It
seems to the writer, in the halo of art and letters and adventure
of the Spanish Renaissance, which was centred In a few, a very few
minds who bore the entire weight of the country's condensed
genius, staggering under it as did Cervantes till he died, or as
Velasquez did who compressed into a life robbed of a rightful
score of years such an Inexhaustible flow of power as might well
crush the vitality from which It sprang. These two spirits of one
age were as wells rather than fountains, within whose profound
depths is reflected not the sunshine, but the vitality of a race in
its rarest possibilities and most cynical gloom, for the first and
last time.
The Spaniards have never worked the joyous sunshine of
their land, mentally or artistically. Their love of colour has the
fire of warm and glowing blood about it rather than sunlight.
Their painters make It glow from within, not from the heat of
the sun. Goya's faces would blush in the dark as in full sun-
light, and to-day Spain has shown that that font of "sang
vigoureux" Is as warm as of old, and Zuloago still holds the
secret of his country's colour and makes it glow upon the canvas
where the sun itself would look pale.
So, if we linger through Spain, it must be in a different spirit
than when in Italy, land of flicker and shade ; searching not for
beauty or the joyousness of beauty in their common sense as
possessed by other fair countries, but for character which is Spain's
own. It's Individuality Is so marked, the landscape and the people
alike so fiercely contrasted to those of all other European lands.
V
A Street in Toledo.
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 9
that for a while the feeling of harmony is lost, yet in no other
spot is that harmony between man and earth so wonderful as in
Spain, and those Moors who found the secret of grafting their
pleasure-loving tastes and homes upon so stern and proud a soil
were in no ordinary degree adaptive.
The first view of the scenery as seen from the north is as a vast
stretch of desert, a sea of gold and purples reaching to the sky.
** Never," says Rusinol, "does Spain seem to me so vast as when
seen from the ' rapide ' from north to south."
There are certain impressions from a country encountered
for the first time which seem, as it were, to strike to the very
depths of the human soul ; to take by storm and completely
subjugate all its complex web of sympathies with nature and
art, stirring at the same time dormant chords of some past
consciousness. Perchance what has already passed into the general
body of human culture has been inspired by the very skies
and outlines of hills now beheld for the first time. Cervantes or
De Vega may have had their share in attuning the mind for its
first glimpse of Spanish country, or some dusky canvas of
Velasquez or Murillo, or long-forgotten page of Calderon. Be
this as it may, no stronger sensation of its kind can be found
than in a first look out of the railway carriage upon the country
as the Paris express rushes to Madrid. What an extraordinary
contrast from the last look out the previous evening over the
rolling meadows of France ! A vast plain with a limitless sweep,
as of some African desert, glitters in the morning sun. Here and
there veritable oases of rock pines mark a strange pattern on its
boundless front, fantastic as the trees in some landscape of Burne-
Jones's canvas. In the vast and lonely country a group of
peasants is silhouetted far away on a white road with the same
distinctness as in Egypt. The borderland to the peninsula
has been crossed in the night — the atmosphere of the true con-
tinent of Europe left behind — and a single coup-dceil is sufficient
lo IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
for the all-mastering force of the impression received. There is
only one word for it — Spain, and the world behind melts away
under the dazzling splendour of its hot African sky.
Ever so vainly may we try in after wanderings through the
length and breadth of Spain to analyse the causes of such distinct
emotions, to search the mountains and plains that nature may
give up her ultimate secret. But whether under the mouldering
On the Road, Toledo.
walls of Tarragona, or watching the cathedral spires of Segovia
kindled with the last rays of the setting sun ; whether in the
tortuous streets of Toledo or the echoing halls of the Alhambra ;
whether in the vast Moorish pile of Cordova or in the giant
Gothic fantasy of Burgos, the intimate charm of this strange and
fascinating country is equally impalpable, equally elusive, and it
is, perhaps, the more alluring for this very reason.
Approach Toledo for the first time. Already an hour from
Madrid, we have sunk back centuries as we pass arid treeless
expanses, such as Dore dreamed of when he took in task the trail
of the landscape of Cervantes. " Le paysage de Tolede et la
rive sont parmi les choses les plus tristes du monde," yet its sad-
ness has in it a wild vitality which robs it of the inertia of
melancholy. The slowly crawling train deposits one within half-
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN ii
an-hour's walk of the market-place. But a step from the tiny
station and the existence of railway is an anomaly. Take a seat
on the omnibus drawn by jingling mules and the whole modernity
of life seems at an end — to fall down the abyss of time with the
first crack of the muleteer's whip. This is not our time, our
century. The mind slips back to a mediaeval setting as com-
pletely as though it had never left it. It is as the Canterbury
pilgrims that Toledo is approached, and another frontier has
been passed, the frontier of time. Slowly ascending the dusty
road, the charm of a wondrous town site grows more and more
intense. " Dans cet apre pays surchauffe, Tol^de apparait comme
une image de I'exaltation dans la solitude, un cri dans le desert." '
The river below gleams serpentinely like a white ribbon through
the plain, and entering beneath the gate of the bridge which
spans the ravine, the portal of time is passed into the never-
changing life of a spell-bound city. City of fable this, of royal
legend and hidden treasures, of necromancers and haunts of
occult science, of gems and crowns for brow of king and youth-
ful princess, nameless and for ever unknown.
Was it not of this old bridge, athwart which a wild sweet
mountain air sweeps, that the exquisite song is sung, —
" Vraiment la Reine eut pres d'elle, ete laide,
Quand vers le soir,
Elle passait sur le Pont de Tolede
En corset noir.
Un chapelet du temps de Charlemagne
Ornait son cou. . . .
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou ! oui, me rendra fou 1 "
Across this bridge, beneath which groups of washerwomen
are clustered, splashing their soapsuds round the curves of the
river, and over which as the day falls herds of goats and laden
^ Barr^s.
12 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
donkeys pass lazily, flecked with the setting sun, how many
heroes of romance have passed ; and of it how many ballads have
been sung. Long after Toledo had fallen in the eleventh
century, the native poets continued to voice their abuse of the
Moorish' knights, and praise of the Christian caballeros who had
vanquished them. The spirit of all these ballads is the same,
and the following is one of the oldest, dating from the fifteenth
century, —
"Within a tower is Sevilla,
(loftiest tower of Toledo)
Lovely is she as a vision.
Love itself had never seen her.
'Twixt the parapets outleaning
She saw the river banks of Tagus,
The far fields all dark with branches
Carpeted as though with flowers.
And by a wide road far beneath her
Saw a prancing knight come towards her,
Armed with all the arms of knighthood,
Riding on a piebald stallion.
Leading seven captured Moors,
And in chains Aberrajados.
In. his conqueror's wake he followed,
— Dusky dog and Moor despised —
Clothed with torn unknightly garments,
On a steed worn out and limping.
Yet in countenance appearing
Dauntless warrior, though disguised.
Loudly he blasphemed Mohamed
In wild language and upbraiding.
All his bitter anger voicing.
' Stop,' he cried, * O Christian mongrel,
Who, ere prisoner you made me.
Took my father yonder captive,
And, as well you know, my comrades ;
If thou'lt give me them in ransom,
Then will I in gold redeem them ;
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN 13
If thou still refuseth freedom,
Die to-day, or be ;«y captive.'
On hearing this, then Paranzules
From his rearing steed leapt lightly,
Thrusting forth his shining lance blade,
To the Moor it seemed to glitter.
With such fury and such swiftness,
Such thrust of lightning all unparried.
That almost to the earth it felled him ;
At the very first encounter
Horse and Moor alike lay vanquished.
Then on the Moor his foot he planted.
And separated head from body.
After this had been accomplished.
Back into his saddle springing,
The knight rode proudly to Toledo." '
Passing up the steep ascent, the Puerta del Sol is on the left,
still in shadow, for the sun plays on it but lightly and for a
brief while each day. Little is known of this splendid old gate
which, together with the blocked-up Puerta Visagra, make two
such landmarks in Toledo. They seem to belong to a transition
style of Arab architecture of the eleventh century, rather than to
the Arab-Byzantine, such as is seen in Cordova, Tarragona, and
elsewhere. But in the Puerta Visagra, first built before 838, one
sees various features older than in the Puerta del Sol, in which
is already seen the arch with several lobes and the pointed arch
found later in the Giralda of Seville in the twelfth century. It
cannot have been completed later than the eleventh century,
since Toledo fell in 1085^ and in its present condition belongs
only to the setting splendour of Moorish Toledo.
The architectural formation of an old town must have a
certain influence over its progress with the times. A fortress
' Translated from Collection de Romances Castellanos. Ant'teriores al Siglo
XVII. Duran.
* G. de Prangey.
H
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
town like Toledo, built above sweeping plains and surrounded
with river and walls, rarely follows rapidly in the course of
civilisation, and must look on inertly while the busy cities below,
which in warlike times were of so much less importance, speed
ahead in progress. It
would be difficult to
imagine Toledo modern-
ised. People visit it to-
day as they would the
toy towns of a Universal
Exhibition, as we did the
Vieux Paris of 1900,
enjoying the sensation of
age without its realism.
The entire town of To-
ledo is as an enduring
monument in Spain, and
the very people who in-
habit it are monumental
in their efforts to keep in
touch with the old-time
sleepiness which now per-
Interior of House Where Cervantes sojourned. vadcS it Even the VOUnff
military element which is soon to pass into it will have to con-
cede to the spirit of the place, for the character of an old and
decayed city is as hard to transform as the character of some
old-fashioned mind.
Like all Spanish towns, Toledo should be seen in the spring,
when the cold interiors have been tempered by the radiant
Spanish sunshine, when the almost universal poverty of the town
has been thawed of its winter suffering, when every window is
thrown open, and through every open window drifts the scent of
flowers, of Neapolitan geraniums and roses. The flies are apt
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN
15
to be trying, but the resignation with which the Toledans sup-
port them is not the least among their old-fashioned qualities.
" Ah," said a Spaniard to me with a smile of resigned pride,
after he had slapped his oiled head countless times, "those flies,
they cannot TQslst."
It is in Toledo that the first impression of Spanish gloom is
felt, underlying the ap-
parently pleasant manner
of the people. It is here,
too, that is first felt that
curiously slow and cling-
ing stare with which the
heavy eyes of men and
women greet the stranger.
It is at once repulsive and
brutish, and utterly lack-
ing in the vivacious curi-
osity of the Italians or the
impertinent impudence of
other races. In a land
so saturated with pride of
birth and monarchical in-
stitutions, socialistic ten-
dencies have developed almost entirely from religious fervour,
which unites all men and makes them equal. Even among
the good-natured poor there is a kind of implanted famili-
arity in their manner towards all the world which repels
far more than it attracts. But one must learn as best
one may to detect when the best intention prompts a gloomy
aloofness or an unexpected ease, as for instance, when some
old peasant will seat himself beside one on a wayside seat
and accompany his unsolicited conversation with digs of
labour - hardened elbows. A Spartan smile is not lost in
A Shop, Toledo.
i6
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Spain, where a disdainful word would rouse a very flame
of fury.
Spanish pride is hard to define. A Spaniard in London once
remarked that if he asked his way in the streets, he was answered
with a kind of " pride of
'^- ^ ' l Ji J •
■^^"^^ . t^'iirrl birthplace," as though
any question on such a
subject was worthy of
the greatest attention.
It must indeed have
struck him as strange.
In Spain, on the con-
trary, a query on the
same subject rouses a
contempt for whoever
confesses ignorance of
anything Spanish, and
I know of no other
nation that can so well
interpret the old verb
"to pride." Let the
stranger who longs for
a responsive smile and
alert intelligence turn to the children of Spain, who seem so
full of that pathetic vivacity which leads to no goal ; let him
get a child-guide who will point him out everything, good
or bad, fair or foul, with lively impartiality, continually
looking up at him with large dark eyes in which but the
shadow of settled gloom has as yet penetrated. He need
search for no better guide through the labyrinth of Toledo to
all the sights of the city : to the Cloisters de los Reyes, white
and flowering with harmonies of spring and discordant reliefs ;
to the old Taller of the Moors, where duenna-like old women
-mi.
A Doorway, Toledo.
Toledo — A Stkret Scene.
IMPRESSIONS OF SPAIN
17
sit and gossip in the afternoon during the desultory sale of milk
and butter, while the hot sun works round the dusty stucco of
the inner walls ; to the Casa de Mesa, on which the Moors in-
scribed their exquisite lettering. He will guide as though he
were the man, and his follower but a helpless child, through the
casual goats, the pack-
laden donkeys or per-
sistent beggars, up side
streets and secret alleys,
naming with swift deci-
sion everything at which
the stranger may happen
to glance. '* Senor, a
dog ; " *' Senor, it is a
cat" — or a trim ass, or
whatever it be, his alert-
ness roused by the firm
belief in his companion's
complete ignorance of
everything under the
sun. In the eager child
it is a charm ; in the
man a stupid insularity.
Moorish Toledo is far more attractive than the Gothic.
Indeed the Gothic world of Spain as a whole is curiously unin-
spired, and often conveys the impression of a struggle against
other influences, feebler but less clumsy. Nor are the interiors
of Spanish churches sufficiently pure in harmony to throw off the
destroying effects of overcharged ornaments and decoration, and
we learn less of the Spaniard's philosophy of art by studying the
interiors of his churches, than we do of the Italian's in his. Those
of Spain and Naples alike are choked with details which refuse to be
passed over, as though eager to emphasise the same curious lack of
k:
Gateway, Toledo.
1 8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
sculpturesque spirit in the Spaniards as in the Neopolitans. " They
contain draped statues, coloured saints in actual monastic garb,
with yellow skins suitable to assthetics, and bleeding hands and
wounded sides characteristic of the martyred. Alongside of these^
appear Madonnas in royal robes, in festive dresses and in bright
silks, crowned with diadems, wearing precious necklaces, brilliant
ribbons and magnificent laces ; and with rosy complexions, ghtter-
ing eyes and eyeballs formed of carbuncles. By this excess of
literal imitation the artist gets no pleasure, but repugnance, often
disgust and sometimes horror.' More than that, it tempts to
crime, even in this fanatical country, and the jewelled hand of a
Madonna was patiently kissed till her pearls had been dislodged
from their fragile setting and borne away between the teeth of
silently blasphemous lips, while the diamond tears of another
were too carefully dried away !
In the Cathedral of Toledo, which rose to rival that of Burgos,,
and in which one of the most costly altars of the Renaissance
glitters in extravagant gilding and ornament, there are beautiful
dim recesses, and the Mauresque chapel makes this interior
singularly in keeping with the spot. Here, perhaps, wandering-
at hazard through the lofty isles, a sacristan will lead the way to
that dim chapel where, with lighted candle and fumbling key, he
will open the old enclosure which shuts away the San FranciscO'
of Alonso Cano. See how the light thrust in flickers through
the darkness on to the miraculous figure of the Saint, pale as
death, with livid lips of agony and divine longing, till once more
the door is closed, and only the ever-haunting remembrance
remains, even when again in the sunshine of the narrow streets.
^ Taine. •
A Palm Grove in Mlrcia
CHAPTER II
^Andalusia
" C'est une Afrique." — Maurice Barres.
More than any living writer has Barres interpreted the psycho-
logy of Andalusia. As though penetrated with the atmosphere
of Southern Spain, past and present, he writes from within rather
than as a spectator. There is an opinion that sympathy shown
with, for instance, the gipsy race, indicates something of gipsy
blood within one's own veins, as was the case, it is insinuated,
with Bunyan, or Borrow, or Sir Richard Burton. The same
might almost be said of the Spanish race, which is one of the
hardest in the world to understand, and it is therefore doubly
interesting that this writer should have struck so justly not only
the familiar Romanesque sentiment of the South, but the very
vibrating chords of Andalusian consciousness as well. Ah ! if
one could for a while be a Spaniard in the streets of Seville, look-
ing out — not on the world — but on just those streets — from
under the shade of the sombrero, from over the folds of the
mantle ; if one could feel for even a moment the blood of the
people which is as their language, and then, back in one's own
skin, analyse all from within. But the contrasts of race come
surging up, the slow pulses of our progressive civilisation throb
coldly against the passionate conservatism of Spanish humanism.
Here within touch of it, there beyond its sympathies, at moments
stirred and at others frozen, the North and the South seem to
meet only to turn away. Listen to the guitar and the rebec,
see those floating shawls that pass, meet those eyes that seem to
19
20 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
say whether they would or not, " Well, what of it, are we not
all Moors here still ? " Meet the mysterious insolence of the
dazzling gipsy eye, feel the hot sunshine and the beating shadows,
the languor, the burning breath of day, the craving for the
night. Listen, and see and f^el^ and yet know nothing — that is
Andalusia.
What contrast can be found within so small a compass as
that between Cordova and Seville? Cordova seems to have
wrapped herself within a veil and to stand sorrowfully apart, far
from the sensuous atmosphere of gardens, of the courts of love
and of pleasure. For only what was vigorous in the life and
death of Moorish days has come down to us here ; its promise
and ambition, its monuments, its honoured niche where stood the
lamp in which the flame of learning was kept burning till Western
nations, wondering at such magnificent light, bore it away to
illumine their own path. Black as the shadows in a canvas by
Ribera are those cast by that great past, and only strong light
could have cast them. All here is strong shadow and echo —
echo which seems to repeat with resignation the words of Renan
upon the profundity of Arab science and learning and art — "La
langue, rien que la langue ..."
But the vast central vistas of columns in the great mosque
are still instinct with far more force and virility than can be
found in the graceful chambers of the Alcazar at Seville, or in
the voluptuous courts of Granada. Even the massive fountain
in the cathedral orangery has a certain sternness of its own,
surrounded by brawny drawers of water, and echoing to their
strident laughter. Such is Cordova, vital sepulchre for the life
of to-day, and as though to emphasise still further the atmo-
sphere of detachment between the past and the present, the
contrast between life and death, we see in the small cemetery of
the order of San Bruno an open grave, which always remains
waiting for its burden. No sooner filled than the earth is turned
ANDALUSIA 21
from another, and the monks view it daily with reflective
melancholy, with that powerful fascination which Spaniards feel
for the skeleton of life as well as for life itself.
It is no doubt a trite remark that the impression of inertia
which Andalusia reflects is no faithful mirror of Spain's pro-
gressive energy to-day. Andalusia is not Spain — never has
been — though for one century her great artistic cradle. For
some obscure reason the inspiration of art is profoundly sus-
ceptible of certain influences of nature over others, and will again
and again bring forth seed in one spot, while other areas, no less
beautiful, perhaps, remain barren of just that wording of the
soul's speech. Overlapping the after morn of the Moorish expul-
sion, as though to assert new life on the very spot where so many
foreign arts had bloomed, the extraordinary artistic buoyancy of
Spain began when Murillo, Velasquez, Herrera, his unsympathetic
master in Seville ; Ribera in Valencia ; Cano in Granada, rose
within a common firmament. Until the eighteenth century
Andalusia was, in spite of her Oriental languor after the largest
intellectual and physical massacre the world had ever seen, fuller
of artistic vitality than Northern Spain where the great thinkers,
the dramatists, theologians and historians all flourished ; and the
South kept for itself the sunlit birthplaces of the old masters
which have now become with time as their tombs, monumental
for all ages and casting shadows in which men pause eagerly to
breathe in the old inspiration of a great age. But no young
force, like love amongst the ruins, dreams in the midst of
Andalusia's heavy sleep.
No, Andalusia is not Spain, for the strong life of the Spanish
people has never belonged to it, and even the part they played
in the gardens of the South during the most important period of
their history remains totally obscure. If in Roman days Cordova
was the birthplace of Lucan and the two Senecas, and not far ofl^,
in wild rugged Bilbilis, the bitterly sarcastic, life-loving Martial
22 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
first saw the light ; if Avicenna, Averroes and countless poets
and students looked upon the scenery of the spot as their own ;
if both ages, Roman and Moorish — the satirists of Roman days
and the philosophers and enthusiastic translators of the Moorish
Khalifates — were proud to drink their inspiration from a common
well, the intellectual life of united Spain has never consented to
flourish in their shadows. Cervantes, Calderon and De la Vega,
with their "cataract pens," Quevado, Spain's greatest satirist
whom, alas ! the gods loved not, all were of the North ; and to-day
Echegarez, with his versatile and many talents, hails from Madrid,
while from Catalonia, where life is as sturdy and go-ahead as
anywhere else in the world, came the poets of the troubadour
age, come the artists of to-day : Rusinol, poet and painter of
deserted gardens ; Zuloago, with his bold handling of human
passions ; Valera, with his fine analytical pen.
No sooner had Moorish energy faded in the South, however,
than the artistic genius of the Spanish people underwent a
change, and gradually deserted the gardens of Andalusia. It
drifted completely away from its first cradle and sought the
shadow of the far more intellectual North. Goya, the bold link
between the old and new schools — child of genius and caprice —
belongs not to the delicious sunshine of Seville or Valencia ; and
Fortuny, he, too, was born elsewhere among the strong and
laborious people of Tarragona. With these two great names
Spanish art changed its river course, perhaps for ever, and like a
spark of fire illumined the appalling tristesse of Academic Madrid.
So, Andalusia, in a modern sense you bloom apart from Spain
though in its midst — bloom apart by right of exotic not intel-
lectual interpretation of life, while Cordova, Seville and Granada
are now no more than an extinguished halo, the abstract symbols
of your story. Not yet does your prose show what you are, only
your poetry tells what you have been. Valencia smiles at us with
living gaiety, but Valencia is Jewish rather than Spanish. Seville
RONDA. — A SCENK IN ThE PlAZZA.
ANDALUSIA
23
^
^r
sparkles with gaudy hues, with beautiful women, for " Certes,
I'Espagne est grande et les femmes d'Espagne sont belles,"' but
Seville is Flamanco, not
purely Spanish. Cadiz
belongs to the sea no
less than does Venice ;
she detaches herself
from the peninsula
like a pearl that the
waves refuse to give
up. Ronda, where the
king is seeking to re-
vive the old spirit of
noblesse with forgotten
orders of chivalry,
seems to stand out
from the midst of
Andalusia as a breath
from the Pyrenees,
too keen and vital in
its atmosphere not to
separate itself from the
languor of the plains
around and the ener-
vating loveli- _._
ness of Alge-
ciras, where ^
we pursue
the phantom
of Andalusia to the brink of the sea that divides it so narrowly
from its mother earth of Africa. And that African spirit of
Spain, where can it best be studied ? Surely in the little
^ A. de Musset.
TovvEK OF S. Maktin, Valencia.
24 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
town of Almeria, as spotlessly white and Oriental as Tangiers or
Kairowan. Whether life really moves here or not I know not,
but the very sunbeams of this happy spot seem stationary. See
how they send their shafts through the closely-planted trees of the
principal avenue, where the minute social life of the town passes
to and fro a hundred times in the afternoon, like the hands of a
clock that counts not the hours. And Murcia, with [its palm
groves, its old legendic stigma of history in its Puerta de la Mala
Muger ? Ah, Murcia, it would be difficult to receive a more
profound impression of natural fertility and human negligence, of
Andalusian bloom and Andalusian inertia, than about this exquisite
corner of Spain where the oranges lie shrivelling on the ground
beneath the mingling shadows of their leaves and of magnificent
palms, waiting with its infinite hidden wealth, its certain double
crops a year which no year ever sees, for the ocean-spent rivers to
spread, not like one but many Niles, athwart the land. That
Andalusia will be again irrigated as in the time of the Moors, few
now doubt. But the gift of water will come not only from the
North, but from the influences which fortunately for Spain combine
foreign energy as well as Spanish pride. Now that Carlism lies
dead, there seems every chance of Spain becoming as centralised in
Madrid as France is in Paris, or as Italy is not in Rome. Centralisa-
tion is not so bad as some think if it be allowed to develop round
a throne upon which an able though youthful king is seated.
But the undercurrent of progress which is undoubtedly mani-
festing itself all over Spain is hard to keep in view in Andalusia.
The people are not naturally progressive ; and schools and
colleges and railways are no more indicative of internal energy
than, let us say, in China. There is one feature, indeed, in
common between Andalusia and the whole of Spain, and that is
the lack of intellectual life of any kind among the Spanish women.
Charm, beauty which is perfectly natural, for they rarely borrow
any assistance from art, the most graceful manner, the most
On the High Road, Ronda.
ANDALUSIA 25
delightful interpretation of home life ; these all exist, but little
else. No outside interests, no ambition, an absolute indifference
to art, literature, or even music in its higher sense. What other
country in Europe can say with equal truth : " No women play
any part in our story ; their names are not found among the
names of those we honour with laurel wreaths or commemorate
in any way among our artists, patriots, poets, musicians, novelists."
Side by side with Spain and in the same hour Italy, too, lay
prostrate, but the vigour of returning life penetrated the minds
and souls of her men and women alike. Her women had no
Eastern veil to throw off, but in Spain the dearth of female energy
and scope has done much to hold back Spanish progress and to per-
petuate an Oriental one-sidedness in her sociology which Western
nations no longer recognise. Whether this be one among many
reasons or not, the civilisation of the South of Spain, at least,
seems on a low plane without any especial ideals, such as some
believe stir the Spaniards of the North.
Deny it who will, Flamanco Spain signifies more than merely
all that is picturesque, untutored, gaudy, impertinent and in-
different. Wherever the Flamanco shadow is cast, there progress
in some form or other stands still, and whatever parallels are
drawn between African soil and race with those of Andalusia,
they are heightened by the existence of these nomads who offer
the same barrier to progress as do the wandering Bedouins of
the desert. Every effort made to expulse the gipsies from the
country has failed. *' Encouraged by the expulsion of the Moors
in 1 609- 1 1, Dr Sancho de Moncada, a professor in the University
of Toledo, addressed Philip III. in a discourse, published in
1 6 1 9, urging that monarch to drive out the Gipsies, but he failed."
They seem destined to hold their own by all the most frivolous
of arts, and to dance away stern decrees no less now than in the
time of Charles V., when gipsy dances formed part of the
marriage festivities at Toledo. " Yet the Gipsies have had their
26
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
great men, whilst their pure blood has leavened much dull clay
and given fresh life to many an effete noble vein . . . while some
of the most learned and famed of the priesthood in Spain
have been, according to a Gipsy, of the Gipsies or at least of
Gipsy blood." ' Nevertheless, no matter where it lingers, the
Flamanco element lowers the moral and progressive standard of a
In the Market-place, Murcia.
country, and in Seville that element is very distinctly felt. " They
are," says Bourgoing, " the shepherds of the Spanish stage, less
insipid but also less innocent than ours. Their knavish tricks,
their plots, their amorous intrigues of a piece with their morals,
are the subjects of several j-^j^^/^j and tonadillas^ and in this school
more than one of the spectators is formed." The gipsy's view of
life, his passion for display, for dance and song, for boastful and
idle existence — these have become Spanish as well as Flamanco
traits in the South. Whether the descendants of the great tribe
of Jatts from the banks of the Indus first imparted these features
to the Andalusians or not, whether those bands that first migrated
^ Sir Richard Burton.
ANDALUSIA 27
through Egypt and Morocco or across the Pyrenees into Spain,
brought with them this hypnotic extravagance, none can now
precise, but, to its detriment, parts of Andalusia seem to owe all
the qualities that attract the outsider, artist, poet, or idler, to this
unaspiring people.
In what mysterious link between man and his environments
are we to trace the undeniable influence which some cities seem
to exert upon the dweller within their gates? Is it some law of
nature imperfectly understood as yet by science, which a French
writer of the day has discussed under the title of '* L'hypnotisme
de la Foule " ? Is it a force impalpable, psychical of the mass that
dominates the individual, opposing, moving and guiding with
subtle, ever-constant force the native freedom of personality,
forging, as it were, invisible chains that bind the mind of the
citizen as well as his body to the avenues and mansions that
overshadow his daily life. For within the walls of many an ancient
town there are narrow streets and open piazzas for the soul also,
and the shadows of mediaeval churches and palaces are lurking
places for strange spirits of the mind and the will, as well as for
the bodily members when wearied with the noonday heat. Or
is it the ever-pervading panoply of art, the perfection of ex-
pression of will, faith, ideals and aesthetic craving, that has
crystallised the outward decking of an old town with such acute
force of bygone energies that the receptive spirit falls unconsciously
under its spell, and becomes to a certain extent within its walls
the thrall of a past that is ever present, a past which tempers or
impels the dynamic forces of modern life, and resolves the active
free initiation of the individual into the dreamy exterior of past
ideals realised, and imperious in their bond over all who may meet
their message. Athene Promachos dominating the roofs of
Athens, is the eternal symbol of the city of centuries. Cathedral
spire and vaulted aisle are her shield and helmet, and the tor-
tuous streets and by-ways are winding as the serpent at her side.
28 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
But who shall fathom the soul of the ancient city and compel this
daughter of the gods to give up the secret of her unfathomable
intellectual charm ? That an old town has such a character,
distinct, individual, personal, there can be no doubt to any mind
endowed with sensibility of perception. That this charm can
take possession of the faculties, can absorb and delight or sadden,
can mould the character of youth or trouble the spirit of maturity,
of this there also can be little doubt. A gifted writer of the day,'
speaking of Bruges, has said, —
" Cette Bruges apparait presque humaine . . . un ascendant
s'6tablit d'elle sur ceux qui y sejournent. EUe les fafonne selon ses
sites et ses cloches.^'
Such is the mighty force of the town of the past in which the
visible monuments have worked a mystic bond with the inhabitants,
so that all who dwell there must partake of the strange impalpable
spirit of the place. How profoundly true this is of Seville,
anyone who has lived for a time in the town will be ready to
admit, but what a glittering many-sided character to analyse is
this one, if we endow it with its proper personality, if we seek to
unravel the glittering threads that make up its twisted medley of
impressions.
The labyrinth in the garden of the Alcazar is not more
bewildering. In the shadow of the lofty minaret bell tower, one
is dominated by the supreme power of the East meeting the West
— the deep shades of the sombre Gothic interior are all a lower
note of harmony — grim, stern and ghostly, but only a stone's
throw from the banks of the glittering Guadalquivir, whose sands
seem to tell of the tawny sands of the desert, and whose waves
dance in the smiling open space that surrounds the golden tower.
A poet of our time has said that the West and the East shall never
meet. Such, however, is Seville — a contradiction in terms, a
chapter of impossible contrasts — like the cutting icy winter wind
^ Georges Rodenbach.
ANDALUSIA 29
which sweeps down the Alcazar's garden-walks flowered on every
side with blossoms — and glittering with the glint of baked
Moorish tiles. As some colder flower of Western womanhood,
garbed in the gorgeous attire of the East and bedizened with
strange jewels of Arabia, perfumed with attar of roses and crushed
scents from desert lands, Seville stands out, bizarre, enigmatic,
elusive, but ever alluring, vibrating with a language of colour as
passionate as the sharp ringing of bells in her towering belfry —
ecstatic as the sumptuous processional of gorgeous canopies that
surge through streets laden with incense in Holy Week. Can
Europe, can the East alone show another such wonder as this
strange meeting of the tides, where the lofty palm trees and the
marbled court yield in nothing to the glories of Islam on
African or on Asiatic soil, and where the dim-lit aisles of cathedral
vista are stern and rugged as the cloudland of northern mountain
fastnesses ? But the inmates of this exotic garden seem rather
charmed in stupor than vivified by the sharp octaves of their sur-
roundings. A devotional hypnotism shows itself in the listless
crowd surrounding some shop windows, where are exposed to the
public gaze tawdry images of the Virgin or the Saints tinselled
with amazing frippery and of a lack of sentiment that is almost
artistic in its very crying emptiness and shallowness. The very
puppets, seem these citizens, of a great religious spectacle, as
though the life which lingers in the letters of the past had sucked
out all possibility of a present for them, and had left them only
the dimmest wraith of a consciousness of future existence.
Andalusia is as the Moorish archives of Spain. When
Ximenez, Archbishop of Toledo and author of a history of the
Gothic kings, burnt at Grenada all the Arab MSS. he could
lay hands on — upwards of 80,000 — he believed that he had
obliterated for ever from the book of history the memory of the
enemies of his faith, and cleared the way for all the histories of
the Spanish people which might follow the work of Alfonso the
30
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Learned. But the Moors had left a crown of laurel which
refused to wither. All the vegetation of Andalusia, the sugar
cane, mulberries, rice-fields, banana and cotton trees, the palms
and citrons, all still speak with the yearly season that changes
the desert into a garden and the brown "camel's back" into a
parterre. Only, perhaps, can the olive count this red soil as
much its own before the advent of the Moors as in Italy or
Greece ; the olive, which never needs transplanting, but chooses
Old FoKTiKrcATiONS, Almeria.
as its rightful heritage all the most poetic regions of the earth,
from the western isle of Japan through the Celestial Empire to
the flowering sides of the Arno and the slopes of the Pyrenees.
So in Spain, the olive follows not only the most fertile but the
most romantic and smiling parts of Spanish landscape ; its
sacred oil burnt before certain images becomes miraculous, and
it links itself into one of the most unique of Andalusian features
— the curious dying-out life of the oil-mills.
They are gradually disappearing before machinery, these old
oil vintages which for centuries of Decembers and Januaries have
typified the rustic Spanish character as it developed, not from the
Moors in this instance, but from something more classic, perhaps,
in its primitive, agricultural spirit mingled with the yearly
ANDALUSIA 31
harvest festivals as were the vintages of" the ancients, alive with
the songs to Bacchus. Sitting over the fire in the mill-kitchen,
on rugged wooden benches, the workmen in the days of vintage
collect to tell their stories, and even to act them, before admiring
audiences of the men and their wives. Garbed in impromptu
costumes, with roughly-painted faces, they make capital actors,
with the strong lights and shadows of the oil-lamps playing about
them grotesquely. The burning olive wood, the flame of the
virgin's lamp that consumes the first oil crushed from the mill,
are said to combine their lights in strange fashion, filling the
corners of the great kitchens with wide patches of shadow.
Rembrandt must have seen these lights combined, for many of
his groups reveal this mysterious illumination, vivid in more
than one point, and in more than a hundred insufficient.' The
brown faces, black and brilliant eyes, blue shirts and bright
melon-coloured handkerchiefs stand out in the determined focus,
or are lost in the strange shadows. And against this background
these men, as wild as are the shepherds of the Roman Campagna,
celebrate their feast of the mills, a feast which is neither
Flamanco nor purely Andalusian, nor in any way Moorish.
Rather does it echo the Dionysian of the Greeks, and after a day
of ceaseless labour, men and women will dance and sing till long
past midnight, a dance at once more candid and more natural
than the better known dances of Spain, since in these lonely mills
men and women meet together wholly for healthy pleasure.
The first impression of Seville is as of a garden of oranges, a
■sparse orange grove. The piazzas, courts, Alcazar gardens, all
are honey-coloured with the fruit which the Spanish proverb
asserts is "Gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at
night." " Civil as an orange, and something of that jealous
complexion," wrote Shakespeare in a playful wording of
Seville's pretty name.
^ Mas y Prat.
32 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
The town is far more living than Granada, that mediasval
centre of proud savagery. The atmosphere is so clear and the sun
so powerful that the very artists bake their pictures in the sun-
shine and declare that in the process the colours acquire a peculiar
warmth. There is but one dark recess in Seville where the sun
penetrates with difficulty, and that is in the vast and gloomy
cathedral which in spite of its lamps — as many as the days of the
year — is like all the cathedrals of Spain, only a dark splendid
tomb, containing smaller tombs, dwarfed by their gigantic
sepulchre. That of Christopher Columbus, borne by four kings
of Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Navarre, is worthy of more than
a moment's attention. But gloomy as it all seems, and barren
of the richer side of Gothic imagination, yet it serves admirably
as contrast to the airy minaret, the happy court of oranges and
sunflickers, the delicious fountains over which the women bend,
with the red carnations in their hair reflected like drops of blood
in the clear water.
The streets of Seville are among the most characteristic in
the world, as they are also the most idle and flippant in atmo-
sphere, the most genuinely Bohemian. For where else is the
Gipsy element so noticeable ^ What strange unforgettable
types turn and greet one with lingering stare as we pass. This
is the heart of Flamanco Spain where, after many a period of
persecution the Gipsy tribe has ingratiated itself into the life of
a people over-accustomed to foreign elements in their midst.
Without an art of any kind ; without literature, architecture,,
without even — here — a genuine expression of music or poetry,
they have coloured the whole place with their individuality.
The very songs, the Cantos Flamancos of Demofice, in phonetic
Andalusian, which, full of weak poesy, languid morals, and
passionate sentiment, are chanted at fairs and markets, in the
streets and caf^s of Seville, are probably not genuine gipsy
inspirations. Their gifts are as illusory as they themselves
Spanish Gipsy Dancing the Tanga.
ANDALUSIA 33
are intangible, and I quote the song by Beranger, because who-
soever has read them will remember the words with visions of
the streets of Seville and the glassy eyes that never reflect the
sunshine, filming over as with a dull tear, when weary.
" Sorciers, beteleurs, ou filous,
Reste immonde
D'un ancien monde ;
Sorciers, bateleurs, ou filous,
Gais boh^miens, d'ouvenez vous ?
D'ou nous venons, Ton n'en sait rien.
L'hirondelle,
D'ou nous vient — elle ?
D'ou nous venons, Ton sait rien.
D'ou nous irons, le sait-on bien ?
Sans pays, sans prince, et sans lois,
Notre vie
Doit faire envie ;
Sans pays, sans prince et sans lois
L'homme est heureuxs un jour sur trois."
Whether attracted or repulsed, amused or disgusted, we see
them on every side, and with difliculty can one imagine Seville
without this strange feature of her population. But that half
its fantastic colour would vanish with them there can be
no doubt, and not all the sunshine of Andalusia could
replace it.
In spite of their surface gaiety, the Sevillians have the one
characteristic which unites all Spaniards — their lack of light
humour and a certain forbidding gloom which takes one by
surprise in this laughing spot. An Englishman who had lived
for years in Seville, and knew the language perfectly, went one
day into a pharmacy for some medicine. While it was being
prepared the chemist entered into conversation with him, and
34 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
apropos of something began abusing the English very
freely. " No doubt you agree with me, senor," he added.
" Frenchmen think much the same about the English as I do."
*' No doubt I should too," answered his customer, laughing good-
humouredly, *' were I not English myself." The man was over-
come. He said nothing, but when he handed the medicine to
his customer refused to take anything for it. I believe such an
instance of unhumorous pride could hardly have shown itself in
any other country. Spain must be judged as a two-face medal
continually, so strong are the contrasts on every side, in the
people's character as well as in the physiognomy of their
land.
Turn, for instance — those who seek for this power of contrast
— out of the sunshine of the streets into the chapel of the
Hospital de la Caridad where, in almost impenetrable darkness,
hangs the terrible painting of two corpses by Valdes Leal, with
its brief inscription : " Finis Glorias Mundi " ; a painting which
seems to sum up all the passion for sharp sensation and violent
contrast in this people.
The original of Byron's Don Juan was born, as all know, in
Sevilk. His parents were Corsicans, noble on one side at least
— noble, proud, ferocious and bloodthirsty, all fine qualities for
that age. Their exiled offspring continued the traditions of his
race, and found in his own personal beauty, his powers of fascina-
tion, his thirst for the blood of hearts, all the weapons for a life of
gallant adventure. Then came a sinister vision, and as violent
penitent as he had been reckless sinner, he sought admission into
the holy order of the Caridad, whose divine mission was to pre-
pare condemned criminals for their end.
It all seems banal enough — a stormy youth, a sudden re-
pentance— and Spain's story is full of such incidents ; indeed the
message of the monastery to the seventeenth century rarely passed
unheard, and sooner or later all sorts and conditions of men — men
ANDALUSIA 35
of genius no less than men with weary souls — were tempted to
end their lives between convent walls. But how different are
the penances men seek out for the sickness or sinfulness of their
own consciousness ! Where one will turn to the message of
Heaven, another will seek out the tortures of Hell as his cure.
In spite of the apparent desire for the peace of Heaven
which Miguel Manara, Don Juan's flesh-and-blood ghost, seemed
to express with his changed existence, here, under the influence
of Leal's appalling picture, other solutions of his inner mind seem
to enter ours. Don Juan sought neither the promise of Heaven
nor the warning of Hell to cure himself of his ills ; but with an
indescribable horror of himself and the incorruptible soul of man,
sickened by memory of sorrow and suffering that does not die, he
sought a last and horrible joy in preserving before his eyes only
what was corruptible. In such a man, to whom exaggeration was
as the very essence of life, only a refinement of abnormal senti-
ment was possible, and this frenzied sensualist found his ease at
last in contemplating only what could not outlive the soul, the
body that haunted him with its vice till he loathed it and gloated
over its ultimate fate. So was Valdes Leal commissioned to open
the charnel-house and seek his model.
Ah, how all the characters of Spanish story, whether of purely
Spanish blood or no, stand out in relief by right of some astound-
ing characteristic, some violent contrast of mental physiognomy
caught, it would seem, in the very atmosphere of the land. Not
one seems normal, whether painter, writer, soldier or lover ; each
seems to have been a prey to the volcanic forces that seized upon
the mentality of Spain, as elsewhere upon the earth's surfaces.
Hardly one of its great men can go down to posterity under one
name — painter, or poet, or whatever it be. One is a poet, but a
soldier, a fanatic, a monk, as well. Another is a national hero, a
King Arthur, but the embodiment of cruelty and treachery also.
Another is a disciple of profane love, but far more than that ; this
36 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
typical sensualist for all ages, a pendant to Cassenova and Ben-
venuto Cellini, dared to teach as a master the lessons of the soul,
and to seek his niche among the canonised saints of the Christian
world. And here, among nuns, in the very centre of the
Madonna's cult, Don Juan's death mask is seen, and curiously
we look upon it, as we do upon all the strange contrasts of light
and gloom in this land, the antagonism between nature and man,
and the yet strong savour which hold all together.
CHAPTER III
Granada.
" Dans CCS palais de f(6es,
Mon coeur, plein de concerts,
Croit, aux voix ^touff<^es
Qui viennent des deserts,
Entendre les genies
M^lcr les harmonies
Des chansons infinies
Qu'ils chantent dans les airs ! "
Victor Hugo.
Contrast, sharp and bitter, is the underlying feature of Spain ;
and here in Granada it reaches a kind of climax. What a virile
and magnificent setting for a decadent people ! What a contrast
between this lofty pinnacle where the torch of Moorish progress
was extinguished, where the " strong and ruddy heart of glorious
Morisma " ceased to beat — and the race who yearly celebrate that
event and their own subsequent decay with the winter snows !
Here where Moor and Spaniard were more closely allied by ties
of blood than in any other part of Andalusia, where the vast
population of fifteenth-century Granada is said to have barely
included five hundred Moors of pure extraction, and where
to-day the similarity of type between both races is strongly
marked, the racial antipathy has developed to an extraordinary
degree since the conquest of the city. We still see the people's
crass pride in having descended from the crusaders of their Faith,
the caballero spirit which greets one from the gutter upwards, as
strong in the South as its origin was in the North. We still trace
close ties between the religious fanaticism from which their
37
38 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
popular aristocracy developed and the old spirit of Islam. Still,
after five centuries of fallen freedom, the gloomy inhabitants of
Granada rouse themselves once a year from their national tristesse
to an acute access of joy, other in spirit to their violent enjoy-
ment of the bull-fight, that " banalite de I'Espagne." The
streets where sound of song or stringed instrument is now almost
unknown, awake to the echo of guitars, timbrels, and rustic drum,
which, in spite of all police laws, penetrate into the very churches
at the midnight mass — churches ablaze with the mystic lights
which Spaniards far back into Visigothic days showed such
passion for on their altars and before their images, and which the
popular street songs still record :
" A las puertas de Granada,
Calle de los Herradores
Esta la Virgin del Triumfo
Con venticinco faroles."
After a year's sullen silence this extraordinary enthusiasm
puts all authority to the winds, and by the time the crowds have
collected to witness the '* Fall of Granada," a drama attributed in
its original form to Philip IV. himself, the excitement has well-
nigh passed bounds. To witness Moor vanquished by Christian
caballero, to see the latter treacherously beset by a dozen power-
ful Moors and conquer them one by one, is exquisite joy. The
race they destroy in effigy has long ceased to give a thought to
the fair country from which it was expelled, but the Spaniards
still insist upon a kind of memorial antipathy which savours of
the old Arab feuds and of the same blood origin. This yearly
fete of independence at Granada is as the mass offered up to the
people's social conceit veiled under an exuberance of religious
and patriotic pride. There is in its wild hilarity a fanaticism
which offers a defiance to progress, for in Spain the serious and
the ridiculous are often as close comrades as were Don Quixote
GRANADA 39
and his man Sancho. It is, as we have said, the land of
contrasts.
The modern town of Granada is just *' modern," nothing else.
The life of the cafes, the beggars, the maimed, the wretched
crowds about the Cartuja, the new streets that hide the incon-
ceivable squalor of the old, the bookshops with their dusty books,
the short-necked women swathed in shawls and with dark and
fiery eyes, the warm-blooded ness of life, and the dearth of existence,
fill the new town with a sort of modern decay such as only our
own age knows anything about. The microbe of a race's decay
which used to hide behind the crannies and nooks of time-eaten
walls, until some strong foreign hand had swept it away, is now
given, in stagnated countries, a new lease of life with a new kind
of whitewash. Let us hope it is not infectious.
The ascent to the Alhambra, up the Calle de la Gomares,
makes the first picturesque approach to the citadel. Lined with
little shops of " antiquities " to attract the visitor who, American
or English, finds a curious pleasure in being " done " when it is
not by his own countrymen, we see windows full of strange odds
and ends, black with soot rather than with time : old keys,
ornaments, piled in artistic confusion, the riffraif of a country
from which all portable treasures have long flown. Here, too,
are coloured stucco models of the Alhambra, reflecting one of the
most hopelessly bad tastes that tourist life has developed. But
all this pell-mell vie de boutique is soon left behind, and passing
under the great portal we reach the shade of magnificent trees
which have for a century's long summers sung the praise of the
foreign hand that planted them. The ascent is but a short one,
and sweet fresh air, songs of birds, enveloping verdure through
which trickles the music of many streams, give this climb to the
Alhambra a wonderful charm. Then comes the first sight of
the great monumental ruin of Carlo Quinto's ambition, only
interesting now as marking in all probability the original site of
40 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
the old mosque, and bringing with it reminder of the words
Victor Hugo has put into the proud sovereign's mouth :
" Si haut que soit le but ou votre orgueil aspire
Voila le dernier terme !"
Whether before or after seeing the palace itself, everyone
who comes to Granada has, I imagine, leant for a few moments
over the parapet of the old Torre de la Vela for the great coup
d'oeil. Far beneath it lies the vast Vega, which is as a field of
history — a field on which mediaeval chivalry left some of its best
traditions of legendic valour and romance ; for was not Spain the
"land of chosen warriors"? There, tinged with those new and
chivalric ideals breathed by the King Arthur of Spain into Spanish
tradition and its romantic poetry alike, the Moors exalted their
old existence, the life of the desert, which is the life of the
warrior ; and there was enacted their citadel's last scene, as
famous in romantic episode as the fall of Troy. The great
panorama of the past lies around, a magic circle of stage on
which kings, not only generals, passed, and where deeds, not
numbers, made war great. He who climbs here on some wintry
day when the lovely hills of snow make earth-bound clouds and
when the sun is flecking the fields to red, may well think he sees
still the gleam of crimson raiment which Moor and Christian alike
wore in battle ; the waving of the crimson flags with their gold
and azure fringes, their loops and poles of gold, their inscrip-
tions to a victorious God ; may think he sees, too, the last of
the Sons of Scarlet throw himself into the combat, mounted upon
a mottled white steed, that old-time biblical emblem of good
fortune, riding a la genette, as was his custom, and pursued by his
unlucky star. Four centuries ago ; but history stands still for who
would read. And it was but within our time that a desecrated
tombstone, which disdainful followers of Islam had long trodden
X
GRANADA 41
down beneath their feet, gave back to the light of Tlemcen a
melancholy reminder of Granada's last milestone.
In the great plain of Granada the Moors, whose love of single
combat had sprung naturally from the customs of the land of Cid,
broke lance against glittering lance and fought their aristocratic
duels on superbly caparisoned steeds. Single combat among
the Arabs of Arabia, or the Moors and Berbers of Africa, had
been all unknown, as it is among those races to-day ; but the
Moors showed themselves masters of it, and the fashion in
mediasval Spain kept up the standard of chivalry, as the vendetta
of other lands still keeps it down. The aristocracy of the sword
was as sacred as that of the descendants of the early Cherifs,
and mounted duelling had another characteristic other than
the noblesse of valour. It increased pride in the steed, which,
like its rider, could feel the prick of the combat. We can no
more separate the Moor of history from his horse than we can
the Arab of to-day from his. Inseparable in battle, created for
man by God from the wind as Adam had been from a handful of
clay, the Arab horse had carried the banner of Islam along
African shores, as surely as the eagle had spread the pinions of
Rome. With far-seeing insight, the Prophet has preached in its
favour, and inculcated its respect.
*' Horses for the combat,
Cattle for poverty,
Camels for the desert,"
says the Arab now as he did yesterday.
The world to-day is satiated with descriptions of the
Alhambra ; but if satiety shadows most beautiful works of art of
our time, ignorance and indifference shadowed them still more in
the near past. The very fact that no profound chords are struck
and echoed through this enchanted alcazar, makes it more than
ever the possession of whoever can enjoy, and who still cares to
42 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
dream. It is one of those happy spots in the world where nature
and man seem to have worked together towards a supreme result.
The delicate configuration of the hills, the smiling loneliness of
the plains, the wealth of woodland that clothes them, all speak
in unison with the fane environed. Scarcely conscious is one of
the transition from nature to art, so exquisitely does the human
achievement crystallise the dream vaguely enfolded in the land
that lies about, and something at least of vague idealism finds a
goal in this work of art, into which the essence of flower-laden
slopes has passed at the touch of a vanished wand. So wan-
dering through the enchanted palace of Granada, gazing each
moment through exquisitely modelled windows at the glories of
sunlit hills and plain beneath, it is difficult to decide from what
source enjoyment is fed most deeply, from infinite nature or
from art. As when sitting in a Moorish garden a sense of
poetic perfection is borne from all sides with the ever-falling
musical ripple of the water, the faint perfume of the myrtles, the
dainty ramification of the " architectura verde," so, wandering
through the vistas of the Alhambra, it is impossible to distinguish
where art begins and nature ends in the exquisite borderland of
each. Impressions alike from within and from without are felt,
and to the most critical mind it would be labour lost to attempt
to resolve this double star, or to appraise the value of the gem,
as distinct from the setting.
The crowning charms of the Alhambra might be summed up
in the words, strangeness and mystery. But let it not be sup-
posed that the strangeness woven for us into this fantastic
structure is in any way due to our unfamiliarity with the senti-
ments of an alien race, nor that the Lions supporting the
Fountain of the Court were to the Moor of that period emblems,
or realistic images of the monarchs of his own desert home.
Even as the Venetians erected upon a column for the gaze of
all men a creature whose fantastic wildness breathes with the
Gateway in the Generalife Gardens, Granada.
GRANADA
43
eager and virile life of the young city of the Lagoons, so the
Moors in this incomparable piece of sculpture have wafted the
dim sense of their own monotonous repose, the sculpturesque
calm of the desert, a chord that still echoes in the Arab's music
of to-day the fatalism of the East petrified in lovely monotonous
harmonies.
There is a window in the Alhambra — all know it — through
which that only real
" Chateau d'Espagne " in
this chateauless land rises
through the thick darkness
of cypresses, far above the
valley's slopes, framed like
living tapestry, between the
Mauresque pillars. It was
the garden of love, of which
Palacio has written :
" un temple ayer de amores y
de gloria,
Y hoy, pagina infeliz de
nueStra hlStOria ^ ^ Window in the Alhambra, Granaoa.
— a garden that rivals in loveliness the fairest vista of the
Alhambra.
Never did the Moors show better than in their pleasure
grounds. " It is delightful to see their gardens when one has
not the weeding and irrigation of them. What fruit ! what
foliage ! what trellises ! what alcoves ! what a contest of rose and
jessamine for supremacy in odour ! of lute and nightingale for
victory in song ! and how the little bright ripples of the docile
brooks, the fresher for their races, leap up against one another,
^ "A temple yesterday of glory and of love,
To-day, a darkened page within our history."
44 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to! look on."^ A very home was this of Oriental romance, a
summer prison for the Moorish princesses of Granada to wander
through, hiding amidst the fountains and flowers, themselves
like exotic blossoms, with complexions " the colour of an orange
flower on which an overladen bee had left a slight infusion of
her purest honey. " And speaking now of these Moorish
women, for whom all the splendour of secular Mohamedan archi-
tecture was built up, in lingering about the Court of the Lions
on which the harem apartments gave, the story of their in-
tellectual freedom reads strangely like a legend, and, in spite of
their delicate charm, these interior courts have the seal of prison
on them as well as of palace.
Here, if slave could rise to queen, it was the change from
one prison to another, where the bars were more brightly gilded
and the fair prisoner wore more numerous and exquisitely-
wrought chains. It was a strange transplanting, this Oriental
harem life into a European land ; but the fair shell where it
lay hidden keeps nothing now but the murmur of flowering
springs and summer breezes.
" Ne songe plus qu'aux frais platanes,
Au bain mele d'ambre et de nard,
Au golfe ou glissent les tartanes . . ,
11 faut au sultan des sultanes ;
11 faut des perles au poignard ! "
There is another "tapestry" view enhanced by delicate
Mauresque openings in the tiny Trocador, itself decorated with
charming paintings of various towns and ports of Tunis, which
tell the date of the restoration of the little chamber — probably
shortly after Carlo Quinto's grand expedition. He was there-
fore enabled to refind here, in this fair and laughing setting, the
memory of his African victories.
^ Landor.
GRANADA
45
Surely no other building of the past expresses such gorgeous-
ness as the Alhambra. It rouses the imagination with eager
effort to picture the life and luxe of its wonderful day. But
these dwelling courts have left no homes for Moorish phantoms.
Men and women alike were too resplendent with the colour of
garment and the brilliancy of gems to have left pale ghosts behind
them. Their passion for life and splendour, for glowing colours,
for exotic song, had something of bodily fire that refuses to be
conjured up with any ghostly moonlight. They belong to the
sun heat of the past, not to
the shades of to-day ; to the
keenest imagination more than
to any historic remembrance.
The Alhambra is alive with
their vitality, but would laugh
their ghosts to scorn.
Brilliant as is the dress
worn bv the rich M^OOrS of design from painting of Charles V.'s flotilla
^ ON THE Walls of the Trocador, Alhahbra.
Morocco to-day, it can give
us but a faint idea of the splendour in which the Nasrite
sovereigns indulged. Sultan and Sultana alike delighted in the
wearing of priceless wealth, and the jeweller's art in Africa,
which — not natural to the primitive Arab — had ever been largely
in the hands of Jews, Berbers and mixed tribes, grew to be
with the Moors of Spain an effete passion. The Berber
and Jewish influences were strong, but far stronger was the
influence of the East. " Le bijou, c'est I'Orient," and it was
the East filtering through every channel of art which trans-
formed Spain and the taste of its conquerors. In Spain itself,
where the rude Visigothic age had obliterated many of the
gentler arts of Rome, the mass of gold and silver work, the
pearls and gems of Toledo, which had fallen into the hands of
the wonder-struck nomad warriors, hardly reflected a general
46 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
delight in ornament other than religious. But with the Moors
personal adornment was a passion. Did not one Sultan lose
his life through the precious stones he wore ? Abou-Said, " le
Vermeil," garbed in the crimson robes of his dynasty, (so runs
the story,) was the guest of the King of Aragon, Peter the Cruel,
whose envy was aroused by the sight of the Moor's priceless
jewels. As the simplest way of possessing himself of the coveted
gems, he murdered his guest in the fields of Tablada, and one of
the rubies worn by this ill-fated king was given by a Spanish
sovereign to an English prince, and may be seen to-day in the
crown of the Queen of England in the Tower of London.'
When in 1492- 1502 the Andalusian Moors took refuge on
the African coast, they took with them such riches as had never
yet been seen in the country. The garments of the women,
their jewellery and golden embroideries, says Paysonnel, sur-
passed in quantity all the woollen stuffs in the tents of the richest
Arabs. Whether this is true or not, most of those rare jewels
have long disappeared ; but if the story was known of all the
extravagant ornaments worn by Isabel and the Catholic sover-
eigns, or of the mass of pearls and fantastic wealth which,
according to Madame d'Aulnoy, covered the half-starved ladies
of the Court of the seventeenth century, we should find that
most of them were Moorish spoils rather than Spanish in origin.
In the heart of Morocco, where so much of the art and taste of
Granada penetrated into the imitated palaces of Boabdil's mourned
kingdom, perhaps many of those 'historic possessions long lay
hidden. Who knows how much of the riches of those un-
fortunate exiles may not still lie buried in the desert soil of
North Africa, since the Arabs from time immemorial have
chosen the mother sand about their tent-poles as depository for
their secret treasures. With, them, buried wealth is often left
untouched from father to son, each satisfied, Arab-like, in know-
^ Paul Eudel, L'Orfevrerie Alger'ienne et Tunhietine.
An Arcade in the Generalife, Granada.
GRANADA 47
Ing that his wealth lies hidden, nor caring to dig up or count it
over — that profound delight of the Western miser.
Not least among the objects of interest in the Alhambra are
the curious paintings on the vaultings of the three alcoves in
the so-called Hall of Justice, which were added by Muley Hasan
in his flourishing and all too brief reign. A writer of the six-
teenth century speaks of this hall as that of the Kings' Portraits,
and it is strange that the error should ever have arisen which
supposed the central paintings of ten figures to represent the
Council of the King, since portraits other than of the Sultans
themselves could not have penetrated into a hall giving directly
on to the women's court. That they represented Nasrite kings
is evident from the two shields held at either end by dragons,
and bearing on a gold ground the blazon belonging to the twenty-
one sovereigns of that dynasty. And that this painting represents
only the last ten before Boabdil (from Mohamed V. of the four-
teenth century to Muley Hasan, his father) is proved by the
words of Mendoza, who was born in 1 503 and passed his early
years in the Alhambra itself. Speaking of the additions supposed
to have been made in the palace by one of its princes, he adds :
*' This royal residence is in its way famous. It was enlarged
later by the ten Icings who came after this prince, and whose
portraits are seen in the hall of the palace. Several of these last
have been known in our time by the veterans of the country."
These kings are seen seated against a blue ground studded with
stars, and wearing the bicoloured dress of Italian fashion,
only introduced into Spain early in the fifteenth century, and
which penetrated with the merchants of Castile or Genoa into
the Moorish Court. The paintings on either side of this
central alcove represent Romanesque scenes, probably some
Castilian tournament in which perhaps one of the portrayed
Nasrite kings figured.
The dress of the women is Italian rather than Moorish, for the
48 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
only authentic design existing as to the style of feminine attire of
that day, seen in a relief in the Cathedral, shows the women of
Granada fleeing from the city garbed in loose trousers gathered
in at the ankle, such as their sisters of Algiers still wear. Among
the delightful confusion of figures and animals in these paintings
may be seen buildings, fountains and many details, all of which
bear the character of the Gothic style of the fifteenth century ; and
all three paintings, whether executed by Moor or Christian, bear
the trace of the same hand.'
So rare are the paintings of Moorish days that we wonder
sometimes what the interpretation of the art was in those times —
when the artistic life of Italy was bursting the bonds of the great
past.
In the days of Ibn Khaldoun it was already the Castilian
fashion in the Court of Granada to decorate royal interiors with
portraits of royalties or celebrities, a taste which had long held its
sway in the East, where even portraits of the Prophet hung in the
mosques, silent witnesses to the impracticability of a religion that
could not embody its God and Prophet in human form. If the
practice was directly against the accepted interpretation of the
Koran, it was impossible for a people absorbing the culture of the
old world to avoid one of the most graceful branches of taste and
talent ; and the Moorish kings of Spain, like the Sultan of
Morocco in the sixteenth century, no doubt excused themselves
by regarding the works of art in their possession as *' exceptions to
the rule," and justified by the fact that only those men most worthy
of commemorating were painted. This, however, must have
given their work, if by Moorish artists, an absurd restriction, and
it would be difficult to imagine the great masters of the past con-
senting to be handed down to posterity by only their royal por-
traits, those magnificent " potboilers " of genius. Easier is it to
conclude that all Moorish paintings in the true sense were by
^ G. de Prangey.
The Court of the Mvktlks, The Ai.hambka.
GRANADA
49
foreign artists, and that inaptitude and not religious restrictions
restrained the Moors' efforts in other than ornamental architec-
ture. The words of the Koran, " Oh, believers, wine, games of
chance, and statues and the divining arrows are abominations of
Satan's work. Avoid them that ye may prosper " — words which
might apply merely to the creating of idols — would have been
more determined in their sense had Mohamed really laid down
commands against this taste which the Arabs of Arabia were
totally free of. The law against wine-drinking arising from the
decided liking for it displayed by the
Arabs, was sternly defined. Yet how
was this law carried out ? Wine was the
keynote to the poetry of the Omeyyade
dynasty of Damascus, and dancing, song
and music, though likewise forbidden by
the Koran, were all in vogue among the
Mohamedans of Spain, who only fol-
lowed the teachings of their Prophet
where it suited them. The religious
crusade against the drinking of coffee fell to the ground before
the weakness of the people for this favourite stimulant. So if
the Moorish fashion for plastic arts or portrait- painting only
occasionally passed bounds, such artistic abstinence pointed to the
lack of any natural talent, and it was only in their adoption of all
the foreign forms of culture that the interiors of the Moorish
palaces were sometimes adorned with painted panels, their MSS.
ornamented with exquisite miniatures, their textures woven with
natural figures, and statues inspired by Greek and Byzantine art
are said to have marked their artistic glory.
So these paintings in the Hall of Justice, tinged throughout
with the rich spirit of the Italian Renaissance, seem curiously out
of place here, where the gifts of the Moors had more than ever
previously thrown off old traditions and evolved an art of build-
Design from the Walls of the
Trocador, Alhambra.
50 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
ing so completely their own. That the centre of their most cos-
mopolitan existence should have produced only what was purely
Mauresque is in itself an interesting proof of Moorish personality,
from the time that Granada had been founded as a kingdom, the
spirit of tribe no longer existed in its old meaning. The great
Mohamedan family who had sought refuge there after the fall
of the old Khalifate of Cordova was composed not only of the
descendants of the early emigrants from Syria, Arabia or Egypt,
the rude Berber elements of the Almoravide and Almohade
dynasties, but the mass of half-converted Spanish and foreign
races who for centuries had been uniting under Islam. A single-
handed race can draw more easily from the culture of others than
a body of heterogeneous breeds and tastes, yet in the midst of this
strange medley of humanity a last and beautiful ray of Moorish
civilisation was seen. If it reflected through its very purity lights
from far-off lands, they were not more than the troubadour poetry
of that time breathed of foreign romance through the songs that
had passed with the troubadour from strange country to country,
uniting in the varied sentiments of a romantic age a single
character. This was the charm of Granada, that into its last
splendour so many rays from other worlds were distilled ; and
whoever turns over the pages of Moorish story will find more of
scope, if less of achievement, in the two centuries that preceded
its fall than in the sturdier, because younger, centres of Cordova
and Seville. In Granada may be traced the climax of Moorish
art, while the decadent Mauresque, which struggled up in the
midst of cruel restriction and the total destruction of Moorish
home life — that starting-point in all their art — pointed more
to the destroying influence of Spanish tyranny than to any
natural decadence of the Moors themselves. They had ceased
to bear their very name, and were but Mudejares, garbed
in cloaks of greenish yellow, while their women wore a half-moon
in blue on the right shoulder. If, following on the fall of
GRANADA 51
Granada, hundreds of erewhile converted Mohamedans of mixed
Spanish nationality reverted to the Christian religion of their
ancestors, through the persuasion that what was good enough for
their forefathers was good enough for them, the purer-blooded
Moors did not accept the new order of things so easily. We
know that the final loss of Spain was bitterly felt by them, and,
counting on a speedy return, they had taken with them, on leaving
Andalusia, the wrought-iron keys of their homes. These keys,
religiously preserved in certain families for long, constituted with
them a title of noblesse ; and for long the memory of their lost
country inspired the poets of the Western Maghreb, where the
greater number of Moorish exiles had taken refuge.
"Ah, regretted past ; ah, times long mourned and spent,
Ah, Lord, where are those days of pride, days of content ?
Ah, we have outlived them all, their evening seen,
(Alas, abandonment of Spain, how cruel hast thou been).
Ah, Granada, ah, pleasant were the nights we passed
In Granada, city of pleasure that could not last.
Ah, Lord, there beauty we found and fair disdain,
(Ah, harsh hast thou been to me, abandonment of Spain).
Ah, my God, by Thy mercy I would return once more,
I would revisit that happy spot, ah, once as of yore.
Ah, Lord, in this quiet hour unite me again,
(Alas, harsh hast thou been to me, abandonment of Spain).
Ah, Thou that deceivest not hopes, nor seest with eyes.
Ah, Lord, Thou to whom each command enfolded lies
In the letter of Kaf and Noun,^ whose decrees are unseen,
(Ah, abandonment of Spain, how cruel hast thou been)."^
' That is to say, the imperatives of verb " to be ; to exist " — words used by-
God to give life to what He creates.
^ Author (Tangier) unknown. Translated from Chant' Arabes de Maghreb.
Sonneck.
52
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Most old towns are haunted by some eccentric living land-
mark ; and Granada has its own, old and melancholy now, who
wanders to and fro within the shadow of the palace.
The typical gipsy, Fortuny's old model, is less importunate
than of old. It is not age that has changed him as much as the
changing spirit of the times. His day is
over, he is but a gaudy shadow of artist
life of the last century, and he knows it.
" Je suis venu ici parcequ'il n'y a pas de
peintres," wrote Fortuny from Granada,
but since then a whole school of artists
has haunted the spot, and every painter,
English, German or French, has found
his picturesque attire attractive. " Now,"
says Fernandez, '* the artists come, but
they no longer paint me with my distinc-
tive dress, my three varied coats. They
paint a cloudy day, with four cypresses and
a fringe of sky, such as one might see in a
churchyard." ' His model days are over
for ever, and even the traditions of those
gipsy times passed within the elegant walls
of the Alhambra, when the women washed
their rags in the Court of the Myrtles and the men lit their
kitchen fires in the polished alcoves, have faded away. He
now entertains the visitor as guide to the gipsy quarters, the
squalid homes of those Gente de Tijeras who in the sixteenth
century followed up the fall of Granada to add to the
degradation of the place. Here, in this strange refuge the
degraded but Romanesque gipsy has for centuries past in-
stalled himself with his paraphernalia of filth and shearing
scissors ; here he trims and doctors up his wretched donkeys
' Rusinol.
Spanish Gipsy Girl.
IIai.l oi<" THE Ambassadors — The Alhambra.
GRANADA 53
for the gipsy fairs, sharpening his wits and scissors alike
against those of his own race, in the effort to exist at all, yet so
indifferent to wealth as we understand it that the Spanish proverb,
"Mas pobre que cuerpo de Gitano," is an ambitious effort to
express where the extremes of poverty meet.
It is a strange scene, this colony of gipsy families, held
together athwart the centuries by no ties of faith, only by consan-
guinity and language, — *' People among us but not of us, nomads
of a progressive age, isolated by peculiarities of physique,
language and social habits, of absolute materialism, and of a
single rule of character, * Self Will.' " ' The Northern Spaniards
find in Andalusian blood a distinct gipsy innervation, and here
in Andalusia the magnetic glaze of the gipsy eye, as brilliant and
as characteristic as in the gipsies of Morocco, is often seen even
in the faces of the Southern Spaniards themselves. Alternately
persecuted and encouraged — now for their quaint habits, mysteri-
ous arts, or their dexterity in iron work ; now for their repulsion
to the ordinary ways of life ; now for their burrowing qualities,
as though it were a crime to sleep in caves and holes before breath
has departed — these Spanish gipsies were at one time even
regarded as indigenous to Spain, and they had perhaps a firmer
hold in Andalusia than anywhere else in the world. If a genuinely
civilised breed of gipsy is ever to evolve, it should be in Spain or
France, the two countries where they earliest penetrated in the
fifteenth century, and where, through the influence of the French
philosophical school, their condition was first ameliorated.
^ Sir Richard Burton.
CHAPTER IV
Origins of ^Moorish aArchitecture in Spain
" The Moors introduced a style (of architecture) more fanciful and ornamental,
which beside had this advantage : it brought with it no recollections of
deterioration and decay." — Landor.
" Unclasp
My art from yours who can." — Browning.
MoHAMEDAN architecture, though far less profound than the
Greek or Gothic, is more difficult to grasp because of its delicacy,
its exotic growth, and the wider field that it covers. It is, and
will always remain, elusive in style, origin, and even in name ; for
what is it.^ Arabian or *' Moorish," Sassanian, Coptic, Persian
or genuinely Mohamedan ^ Whereas antique architecture de-
veloped slowly from its own roots deeply implanted in the strong
influences of Nature herself, and confined for expression to little
else than temple or theatre, the art known as the Moorish of
Spain is that of a mysterious and unchanging personality, a purely
racial taste expressing itself through its victorious religion in
every form of building from mosque to alcazar. This taste
accentuated the Oriental character as it developed, but never
underwent decline such as marked the Renaissance in later days.
The humblest achievements of the Spanish Arabs are marked by
the same grace and elegance, the same singularly fanciful character,
as were their noblest palaces and loftiest minarets. It was an
architecture noticeably human, expressing always the strong senti-
ment of the nomad for the desert, and, in spite of the verdict of
one French critic who refuses to trace the germs of the develop-
ment to their native source, all who have seen and felt the
55
56 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
influence of desert life will find it hard to separate its memory
from the monuments of Spain. The spreading arches and the
doming of the palm, the light supports of his tent, the knotted
ropes of hide that bound them together, the " patterns wrought
by the wind upon the sand," and the scalloped shell thereon
which may be traced in many a dainty arabesque, the thirst of
the desert which called for fountain or stream wherever the tent
was pitched, — from these humble features of his familiar exist-
ence was gathered, perhaps, the cement with which the Arab bid
the foreign artisan bind together old-world arts and make them
his own. We trace in the empty alcazars and mosques Byzantine
and Persian influences, but the breath that blows through them
to-day is still the breath of the desert, fresh, distinct and proud.
So, in studying the architecture of the Moors in Spain, the
only country where it can be studied in perfection, it might be
easier to understand as well as to enjoy, if we admit that so much
was theirs, but no more — the sentiment, not the essentials ; the
whole more than the parts. The essentials were almost entirely
Persian as influenced by the Greeks of Byzantium, and we may
safely affirm that, save in rare cases, the artisans employed by the
Moors were Persian or Greek. Of how far the arts of the
conquered Sassanians affected the Arabs, save in the matter of
their adoption of the horseshoe arch, it is now impossible to
ascertain, since but a shadow of their handiwork survived the
destructive spirit of Omar. But there is much in the splendour
and colour of decoration, as compared with the ephemeral lightness
of the buildings of Spain, to suggest to us the fabulous beauty of
the palaces of Persia which the Arab invaders had destroyed with
a touch in their early and brutal ignorance. Persia was the first
of the countries, because the weakest, invaded by the Mohamedan
hordes, and as Mohamedan civilisation began to take form the
Persians remained to the Arabs in much the same relation as
did the Greeks to the Romans, save that the Arabs drew not
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 57
only from them for their wayward inspirations, but from all the
old worlds whose glorious decay lay athwart their path. They
possessed, therefore, a mind of wealth of which the extent is lost
to us, holding as it did among its treasures the connecting links
between the monuments of Alexandria and the palaces of
Byzantium. No wonder, then, that however wisely is explained
the riddle of architectural development in the East, Mohamedan
buildings keep a mystery of their own, an individuality robbed
from the riches the builders themselves destroyed Persian and
Sassanian splendour, Byzantine and Greek forms — what a mosaic
of beautiful arts ! Nevertheless, Moorish architecture separated
itself from the older schools into something quite unique as a
whole, and so surprisingly beautiful that those who see it for the
first magical time are often wonderstruck that anything so
delicate and so poetical should have resisted the ages, owing its
greatness not to marble and precious stones, but to brick, plaster
and a rude cement.
In the examples existing to-day in Spain can be traced the
gradual blending of the borrowed to the Moorish conception of
the art. Cordova, city of learning a,s was Seville of music, offers
in its great monument an architectural literature, the language
roots of which are almost universal. Though the mosque of
Cordova, which sprang from a Christianised growth of Roman
debris — if such a term may be applied to the riches of the exist-
ing buildings that fell into the hands of the early Arabs — is not
Arab-Moresque but Arab-Byzantine in spirit and profoundly
influenced by existing forms, it expresses far more than the
early use of an architectural grammar. The assertion that where
the materials lie to hand the work is simplified, is rarely true in
art. We see the younger nations of our day toying with the
developed arts of other lands, and producing disastrous results ;
but the Arab builders from Mecca showed more than the merely
adaptive or imitative spirit. Their old stock of desert pride,
58 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
albeit but the pride of a primitive form of noblesse, was to avail
them more in new soil than it had been able to do in their barren
birthplace. If this mosque was identical in plan with the early
mosques of Islam, it stood apart in the intellectual ambition which
gave it real life. Abdur Rahman's desire that it might resemble
the fabulously beautiful mosque of Damascus, exceed in magni-
ficence the new sanctuary of Baghdad, and compare with even
that of Jerusalem, showed a spirit of royalty as well as a leaning
towards civilised standards of art. It is not without interest to
note that of the two rival factions of Arabia to whose feud
Mohamed had set fire, it was the Meccan noblesse of northern
Arabia who founded the first period of the architectural greatness
of Spain, and not the agriculturists of southern or happy Arabia,
the defenders of the Faith whom the Omeyyades had so long
looked down upon. As it was probably the descendants of the
defenders who awakened agricultural life in the wilderness of
Visigothic Spain, so the more aristocratic stock were the first to
start there a new centre of architectural splendour and royalty
combined which made the first period of Mohamedan greatness.
In the mosque of Cordova, the only one of the three great
mosques of Spain now existing, the Arabs typified the more in-
tellectual side of their religious and artistic development, almost
displaying imagination and not merely fantasy in their striving
after the infinite as far as column upon column reaching to in-
visible distances could express it. Without the richness of
twelfth-century decoration or the minutiae of later Byzantine
taste, in spite of its present blocked central nave, its ruined roof
once so rich with form and colour, its diminished pillars and
vanished vistas, we still find within the shaded labyrinth a hold
on the imagination, of which only certain buildings keep the
secret. The capilla Villa Visiosa, mingling mysteriously the
styles of Cordova and of the most beautiful period of Seville in
the Arab restorations of Don Pedro's reign, still fills one with
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN
59
curious wonder as to its origin in the midst of the great mosque's
simplicity. The twelve hundred lamps burning their thousand
" arrobas " of sacred oil yearly have long been extinguished, but in
no building does the play of tinted sunbeam upon wall and
pavement seem to throw such
bright and speaking illumination
on Mohamedan power as here.
Heights which, in the Gothic,
measure their vainly yearning de-
sire against the sky, are absent in
this many - pillared maze where
columns and shadows of columns,
distances and ghosts cf distance,
made once an earthly infinitude for
the faithful. How was it lighted,
this dim religious darkness .? Fer-
gusson believes that the upper part
of the outer walls consisted origin-
ally of an open colonnade. This
marvel of the Middle Ages, con-
sidered as the greatest religious
achievement of the Moors, might
almost be regarded as achieved
in spite of Islam. It rose during
what may be termed the first of the two Arab periods,
before the Arabs had transformed their faith into fanaticism
and their creed into blind dogma, and when a disbelief in
the Prophet was often barely dissimulated ; during the period
when this strange people seemed to be forcing the germs of
original thought and intellect into lasting life. Alas, these
germs never developed in the true sense, and when we wit-
ness the Alhambra in all its blinding beauty we see the work
of a race who in their final creation have drifted back. The
Door of the Court of the Oranc;erv,
Cordova.
6o IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
intellectual note has vanished, and throughout the graceful
chambers and scented courts which breathe such exotic culture
may be traced a curiously subtle prophecy of the " return to
nature " of the Arab, the underlying sensuality of his religion,
the foreshadowing of a most earthbound Prophet's Paradise, to
which the nomad, unchanged after so many centuries, was again
to turn his eyes. The Alhambra is one of those rare monuments
which refined but decadent ages have produced — the mature fruit
of the struggling centuries which voice not individual taste, but
the drift of a whole race. Here the Arab-Byzantine has been
transformed into the " Mauresque," an architecture of orna-
mentation in which, in the eyes of the severe critic, lies its real
inferiority to other schools. The severest critic of all may be
said to be one who had never seen it, but did not hesitate to
term it '* detestable." '
It is, perhaps, idle to remark that however separated the
Moorish architecture of Spain came to be from the Mohamedan
of Asia, or even the Moorish of Africa, the origins of all are the
same ; the same spirit underlies their dividing growths, the same
absence of the usual forms of decadence distinguishes them. It
is impossible to realise the full character of this architecture in
Spain without remembering that it is but a single exquisite limb
of a now wasted body ; and he who travels in Asia, Africa or
Southern Europe must turn to the same sources for the breath
of life which once inflated its mentality. Two conclusions
would seem to confront him : either that the Arab, in his mad
race with religion, developed a seat of intellect where none was
or is to-day, or else flourished entirely by the " picking up of
learning's crumbs," a nourishment which by itself has never
before or since produced a nation. There is, therefore, a psycho-
logical mystery about the architectural language of this people
which, however continuously written by foreigners, expressed
^ Ruskin.
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 6i
only what the Arab himself or the Arabised Moor cared to
express.
As far as is known, the Arabs of Arabia before the birth of
Islam had no system of architecture. The Koran mentions no
form of art. They were a rude, uncultivated people, lovers of
solitude, unconquered and little known by the old dynasties that
closed them in. They were nomads, wandering Bedouins whose
lives were spent in roving restlessly from camp to camp over
their vast extent of barren desert, which barely produced suf-
ficient to nourish them, dwelling in the most primitive tents
or mud huts, and displaying none of the desire to erect buildings,
which is the natural outcome of a people's taste to settle in one
spot. A wanderer's life was imposed upon them by the peculiar
conditions of the desert, a life which our civilisation of to-day
is all unable to change. Only the richer dwellers in cities, the
merchants, had brick houses flat-roofed as they are to-day, and
no doubt clustered together so as to form the narrow belts of
shade which are the Arab's conception of a street. The interiors
were spread with carpets, and again with felt rugs, upon which
the master and his guests sat, much as do the Arabs of our time.
But no indigenous architecture seems to have existed, nor
indeed literature, art, science, or any of the rightful weapons of
civilisation. The Arabs were, perhaps, the most uncivilised of
all the races who were destined to fall under their religious sway.
They were ignorant, for all we know, of the very name of Africa
as the name was then understood ; and it is strange to think that
a people so old and so conservative, so far too from barbarism,
should have left no milestone of their history, not a page to
commemorate their love of story and song, not a weapon or a
broidery to attest their chief delight and only luxury. Whatever
buildings existed in Arabia at that day must have displayed the
same simplicity as their character and ways of life. Even in
Mecca there were but few buildings other than of sun-dried
62 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
bricks, and when Mohamed fled to Medina the mosque he built
was of no rarer materials than bricks, palmsticks and plastered
earth covered with palm leaves — the only example of Arab art
uninfluenced by foreign forces, and of which no vestige of the
original structure remains. What early building in religious
history can compare with it in interest ? Here, after months
of indecision, the direction of the Mihrab pointing towards
Mecca was decided upon, never afterwards to be changed.
Here, we may presume, the Jewish habit of removing the
sandals at the mosque door, which Jastrow considered is a sur-
vival of the still more ancient custom of removing all garments
and entering the sacred presence uncovered, became a rigid law.
Here bloomed near the sacred building the garden which
Mohamed named his Paradise ; and here, when Medina fell,
were hitched the steeds of the victorious Omayyades, whose
descendants were to spread the architectural germ of this earliest
Mohamedan building all over Spain.
As we have seen, this early mosque was primitive to a degree,
showing that the arts of the surrounding nations were totally lost
upon the Arabs until they were themselves masters of those lands,
where, in imitation of Western civilisation, the first effort was made
to give a distinct form to their places of worship. But even this
effort was slow to assert itself, and for the first half century after
the Mohamedans had poured into Syria they seem to have built
but little. Their taste was still too simple, and worship needed
little else than the face turned towards Mecca and the call to
prayer from any house-top. They were but warriors still ; and
however rich in monuments were the countries invaded, it must
be remembered that the active impetus for building had even in
those lands fallen into stagnation. Despoiling of Roman ruins to
build up uninspired sanctuaries was the prevailing note of the
eighth century, and it is all the more remarkable that this
people, with no artistic tastes, should have shown from the
Window of The Captive's Tower, The Aluambua.
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 63
first and in the midst of a dormant period so active a bent
of their own.
That the Arabs were not originally a temple-building people
was evident. This may have been partly the result of the too
many forms of religion existing side by side in the seventh
century — Judaism, Paganism and the various tribal forms of idol-
atry, all worshipped after their own fashion instead of combining
to produce a national art. Only one of the seven temples in
which the Arabs worshipped their own idols outlasted the destroy-
ing hand of Mohamed. This was the chief sanctuary of Arabia,
the Pantheon of all the tribal gods, the primitive centre of a
yearly festival whose origin is now lost — the sacred spot, in fact,
to which pilgrims swarmed, as they still do to the Prophet's tomb.
But this curious building of irregular cubic form — the Caaba or
Cube — does not reveal in its' stern simplicity the link between
Arab and Mohamedan taste. Nor do the towers of Saana or the
temples erected there by the Arabians of the South in opposition
to that of Mecca ; or the marvellous reservoir of Merab, which
Belkis, daughter not of woman but of genii, is said to have
restored, indicate the germs of native genius, for these
last were constructed by tribes who had disappeared before
Mohamed's time. The massive megalithic ruins to be seen
to this day on the coast of the Red Sea certainly mirror
none of the art afterwards developed by the Arabs, and long
before the era of Islam the people themselves seem to have lost
all knowledge as to the origin of the few monuments in their
country. These may have indicated the same spirit as did the
monuments of Egypt — an idolatrous architecture which the Arabs
never pursued — though they gathered something of their orna-
mentation from Coptic sources. So this glancing back into the
great past tells us of nothing other than the life of tent and wan-
dering warrior devoid of all the aspirations of development and
culture, but it adds rather than detracts from the interest which
64 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Mohamedan architecture rouses, and In the radiant colours of
their kaleidoscopic art we trace ever the early freedom from tradi-
tions which made them in art, as well as in military success, the
only untrammelled and ideally adaptive conquerors that the
world has seen.
It was not till the influx of foreign architects into the capital
of Islam that any real impetus arose there for building, and not
till the ninth century — a century after the Arab invasion of Spain
— that the native architecture began to take form. Then came
the usual changes — the pulling down of the simple mosques and
houses and the erecting of new. Buildings of stone and even of
marble sprang up modelled after the neo-Roman style, with
gardens attached, many of which are mentioned as still existing
in the time of the Arab geographer Masardi in the thirteenth
century. The architecture of the Arabs near their base and in
the conquered countries of the East remained, from that time on,
distinct from the style developed by the Moors of Spain, and
might till further have diverged had it not been for the constant
rapport between the Mohamedans of Spain and their cradle at
Mecca in the pilgrimages to the sacred city. Spreading them-
selves out in every direction from their desert, not in large
numbers but with a marvellous power of amalgamating other
races to their banner, the Arabs naturally founded their archi-
tecture upon the models found in their path, and which were
impregnated with the vices of the Roman style of that period
from the baths of Diocletian to the buildings of Justinian. They
converted Roman buildings to their use, changed temples and
churches with their atriums into mosques, made use of the marbles
and columns, and generally exhibited all the features of a rising
but uninventive race. But this abundance of foreign material
already shaped was an element against rather than in favour of
their producing a style of their own, and it no doubt retarded the
development of the Oriental spirit of Mohamedan art. It was
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 65
not till the establishment at Baghdad of the Abasside Khalifate in
the middle of the eighth century, when the Arabs became more
acquainted with the work of the Byzantine Greeks, that their
taste in architecture took another direction and they began
to exhibit a liking for only the rarer forms of building and
decoration converted by constant use into the Saracenic style.
Freed from the influence of each other's authority, these
two inspired forces — the Omayyades of Cordova and the
Abassides of Baghdad — both showed the same activity,
and the architectural monuments of Spain and the vanished
splendour of Persia belong to the same day, in one case
rising under the sway of the descendants of the Prophet's
family, and in the other under that of their erewhile Meccan
antagonists.
So, affected in the beginning by the forms of the late Roman
Empire, and later on inspired by the Greeks of Byzantium, a
system was evolved which became distinctly Mohamedan. Little
by little all traces of the early Christian Basilica, which some-
what influenced the mosques of the eighth century, completely
disappeared. " He who might not imitate the scalloped shell, but
could build the dome " borrowed this feature from the Persians,
and in the East it became a constant adjunct, though in Spain it
never flourished save as an ornamental detail. The dome is not
by any means inseparable from the mosque, and is rarely found
save when there is a chapel attached containing the tomb of the
founder. So most mosques with tombs have domes, though many
tombs are found apart without this addition.^ As in the mosques
of Constantinople and elsewhere the cluster of domes is often
purely ornamental, and rises not over the sanctuary but over the
centre of the edifice. In Syria, where the Byzantine triumphed,
the cupolas glittered with mosaic, and the absence of this feature
of architecture in Spain is certainly the most dividing of border-
' Lane Poole.
66 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
lands between the Moorish of Spain and the Arabian of the land
of domes and minarets.
With these early changes of the mosque, the arcaded court
gained also in importance and size, and the pointed arch so
noticeable in the early mosques of Cairo became like an inverted
Arab water-jar, " inflated beyond the sobriety of the original
type."
The primitive mosque, somewhat like the Basilica of S,
Paolo Fuori le Mura of Rome, was a long square closed in with
walls, with a central court for prayer. The inner court, sometimes
planted with orange trees or paved with stone or marble, contains
almost invariably a fountain or well for ablutions. It is, in fact,.
" a cloistered square,
Roofed by the sky, and in the midst a tank."
In the ancient mosque of Sidi Okba, near Biskra, there is a
curious chamber attached to the court, in which tanks let into the
stone floor allow the faithful to bathe their feet. No building
conveys more of the primitive simplicity of structure than this
fascinating relic with its thirty odd tree-trunks bending beneath
the rude roofing, all white with the creamy brilliance of whitewash,,
and with a graceful and living vigour in every line. Let him wha
has imagined that the slim columns of the Alhambra and its
suave arches remind him of a decadent oasis, of hothouse palms
and desert rills, come to this desert sanctuary upon which the
burning sun has played for so many centuries, and wander be-
neath the rude columns which seem to sway as invisibly as the
palm trees without, and he will find a link between Arab and
Moorish expression, one as purely primitive as the other is
exotic, but both of the desert — the desert as it was yesterday and
as it will be to-morrow.
Unlike the Persians, from whom they were to draw so largely
for almost every form of art, the Arabs were never an artistic
The Castle of the Amourkl on the Tagi s, Portugal,
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN
67
people, though they had, as they still have, the blind, almost
childish instinct for bright beauty so often to be found in un-
critical races. Whatever germ of art was once growing from this
explanted race during the time when the minaret rose with its
original and slender form above the mosque of Alwalid in
Damascus, or when Ahmed -bin -Toulon erected a mosque in
which he purposely refrained
from employing ancient mate-
rials, and endeavoured to pro-
duce an architecture distinct in
character from that of either
Pagan or Christian buildings,
Islam finally robbed it of its
spreading fibres as it crushed
the life from science and philo-
sophy. In wandering through
the beautiful remains — never \
ruins — still to be found in Spain,
we are often tempted to create a
people who never quite existed,
though they hovered so long
upon the threshold of those
qualities with which we would invest them. It is doubtful
whether the Moors ever reached the pinnacle of creative power
which their fantastic history and brilliant halo of art might
lead us to suppose, and in their buildings vain is it to seek
for profound genius or intellectual achievement. But the
story of architecture remains incomplete without the delicate
link of Moorish fantasy woven from so many woofs in a
great age between the simplicity of the old forms and the
rising aspiration of the Gothic. It was formed from old tradi-
tions into something new and strange. It attained perfection
through materials infinitely simple and with a minimum resource
Mosque of Sidi Okba, Kairowan.
68 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to the quarry. A conquering people, says Reber, rarely imposes
its architecture upon the subjugated country ; yet it tinged
all the varied schools, the Spanish and the French Gothic, which
existed side by side in Spain from the twelfth to the fifteenth
century, and that in spite of the many objections to the mingling
of religious styles. Back over the very lands from which the
Arabs had borrowed so many jewels, they spread their work like
a beautiful tapestry over Persia, India, Syria, and Palestine and
Egypt. Yet to all other forms of architecture that of the
Mohamedans remains subtly opposed in spirit, as were the Moors
of Spain themselves after centuries of European influence to the
people they had conquered. Human and architectural reserve
separate them and their art from the Western nations. Nothing
discloses the beauty of the Arab's mosque or alcazar to the vulgar
gaze, and his building is still as closely veiled as are the Moorish
women of to-day and of the past. The most perfect creations
shrink from notice with a delicate refinement of pride, and on
entering the precincts of a Moorish interior the raising of the veil
is as sudden as delightful.
Besides this unique reserve there may be traced another feature
opposed to the spirit of all other forms of art — its fatalism.
Strange as it may seem, one of the charms of Moorish work lies
in the fact that it never indicates any resistance to time or fate,
but accentuates its own fragility with a fatalistic calm. This
fatalism, so strong a feature not only of their religion but of
character as well, may be easily traced throughout the Alhambra,
where the most tender workmanship is exposed to the sky, and
where the very walls are hung with a fragile lacework of
Damaskeen embroidery.
The feature which, together with Corinthian columns, formed
the chief characteristic of the first period of Arab architecture in
Spain — a feature at once most admired and most criticised — is the
familiar horseshoe arch. The name, though not a very happy
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN
69
one, has been fastened to this form of arch by English archae-
ologists for the last century : and who knows who was first
responsible for it ? The only compass used was, as it is still
to-day in the East, the eye of the architect, which would seem to
"uWr
On the Bridge, Cordova.
have been guided by the almost but never quite measured droop-
ing of a palm leaf ; and as an instance of the fact may be mentioned
the arches of a modern building in Tunis, which were imitated
from those of the Archeveche in Algiers. The architect was
forced to cast exact moulds of each arch, finding it practically
impossible to reproduce them by measurement.
From Roman days on it is ever to the arch that we turn for
the distinguishing feature of building ; and as the ogive form with
70 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
its infinite variety became the favourite in India, so in Spain the
horseshoe form became universal, and gained in character as the
Moorish style diverged from a temporary sympathy displayed by
the Arabs of the East with the Gothic shape and the pointed
arch, neither of which are met with in Spain till the eleventh
century. The horseshoe arch seemed to be the natural out-
come of the rounded Roman, as is seen at Cordova, but its origin
is exceedingly old. The Arabs, no doubt, borrowed it from the
Sassanians in the first instance, and its peculiar characteristic of
introducing a diameter wider than the space between the supports
was sufficiently important to develop in time into a new archi-
tectural form. This form was accentuated into a very decided
style by them. If there is much to criticise in this horseshoe
arch springing from above the too expanding capitals, which
often forced the arch in its turn to expand on either side so as to
balance its own weight, it is useless to criticise separately the
combining features of Moorish style. We judge architecture —
perhaps all art — by too many laws and too few standards. The
fantastic curve which the Arabs loved — if it must be admitted,
too well — is an instance of the truth of Disraeli's enthusiastic words
written after the first sight of Moorish building in Spain : " How-
ever there may be a standard o^ taste ^ there is no standard oi style.""
The architecture of Spain is still strongly influenced with all
the characteristics of Moorish days. The jutting windows,
nailed doors, whitewashed walls, tiled patios and fountains, are
all in constant use. Moorish carpentry was borrowed for Gothic
buildings, and left its mark. But while the more fanciful side of
those triumphant arts prevailed, and do still prevail, the archi-
tecture itself has been little imitated, and never perfectly. The
Moorish palace or dwelling was quite unsuited in its construction
to any adaptation of European ways and habits, and could only
linger on in Spain during the sixteenth century for that residue
of Moors who escaped the first expulsion. For these imperfect
MOORISH ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN 71
specimens of native taste we must turn to Algeria, Tunis or
Morocco, where are found a few old houses full of complicated
turnings, low rooms, and inner "guest" courts, where the
fountain plays ceaselessly — houses in which, with an appearance
of ample space and musical patio after patio, is rarely found
habitation room sufficient for the smallest family.
The Arab of to-day looks at the frightful many-storeyed
buildings, which are growing up all over Algiers and the
European quarter of Morocco, with far more wonder than
distaste. To him they are rather amazing than ugly, whereas
the low white structures with square tiled windows and arched
doors escape remark. But the enlightened Moor, in rubbing
against the ugly details of a forced civilisation, may perhaps see
that the old homes of his aristocratic ancestors had something of
elegance about them which the modern ones lack. The ugliness
of an Arab city modernised is such as might well penetrate even
the profound indifference of the native mind, as it awakes in even
some Europeans the regret that their civilisation corrupts — as
one of the most cultured men of our time has admitted — what-
ever it touches.
But with the disappearance of the real Moorish architecture
on the coast-line of African soil the cult for the old Moorish of
Spain has made strides of late, and we realise here, as nowhere
else, what its perfection signified ; for " as blossoms appear
upon the outermost branches of a tree, so the highest develop-
ment of Arabian culture was reached in the most remote country
to which it had extended." '
Impossible to grasp the faintest idea of what this represents
until Spain is visited, so we visit Spain from end to end for little
else. " Far better," says a Spanish writer, " that Spain should
lose a province than the Alhambra." The better has not been
denied her.
^ Reber.
72 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Framed within the wild and almost gloomy beauty of Spanish
landscape, the first sight of the Alhambra, the mosque of Cor-
dova, the alcazars, and not least the cluster of Toledo's towers
and gates, dawn upon the stranger with unexpected weirdness,
effacing all the impressions with which he has come armed. The
unravelling in a once conquered country of the erewhile con-
queror's art, is, as it were, to touch upon a streak of sunset in
full day. Wherever the colour-thirsty Moors lingered, whether
in the North or on the henna-tinted earth of Andalusia, a glow of
smouldering splendour seems still to linger ; the streak of blood
still shining in their legendary cement.'
' The Saracens were said to mix blood with their mortar.
In the Garden of the Alcazar, Seville.
CHAPTER V
The S^oorish Gardens of Spain
" There were gardens bright with summer rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree." — Coleridge.
" Los carmenes de Granada no son romanticos ni primitivos ni modernos.
Tienen su caracter hereadado de los arabes, su tradicion propia y su
propia estilo." — RusiNOL.
Not least among the landmarks of Spain are its gardens. To see
them, and them only, it is well worth while to journey thence ; to
linger during long spring days in the sun-warmed grounds of the
Alcazar at Seville, or in the shadowy corners of the Generalif6 at
Granada, pondering, if so inclined, upon the story attached to the
growth of imaginative landscape in Moorish Spain, or, perhaps,
vaguely wondering from whence arose the complicated geo-
metrical architecture of these unique pleasaunce haunts which
imitate so closely the spirit of the people's buildings. The Moorish
garden is brilliantly suggestive of a race unlike any other in
the world, nor has it evolved from the natural configuration of
the country, as in the case of Italy, where all the land is a garden
'* au sens magique que regoit ce mot quand il d6signe les lieux
mysterieux de la 16gende depuis le jardin biblique des commence-
ments du monde jusqu'aux jardins enchantes d'Armide." Here
in Spain it is as an oasis, the gift of the Moors rather than any
natural growth. The opinion that gardens grow almost entirely
from the formation and natural vegetation of a country is not
always exact. Nobody can admit that Spain, a land of quarries,
was as naturally suited to the brick and stucco work of the Moors
K 73
74
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
as to the Gothic form of building, and had the Moors gardened
according to the soil, they would have indulged only in olive
groves and orchards, rather than in the terraces of exotic plants,
laden with the language of flowers, in which they so delighted, the
tortuous aqueducts and eaux d artifices which form the basis of
their style. Their happy taste for ornamentation found a new
field in outdoor art, and
m
that most complete
specimen of an Arab
garden, the Alcazar of
Seville — that closed - in
labyrinth which helps us
to understand the allu-
sion to the " walled-in
garden " in the Song of
Solomon — the endless va-
riation, the courts within
courts, the tiny fountains
and tiled baths, the ter-
races and orangeries, dis-
play the same fantasy as
seen in their palace in-
teriors. They delighted, too, in foreign trees, and the " parent
palm " of Cordova was but the first of a long series of exotic trans-
plantings, such as the Romans, in spite of a somewhat limited flora,
had, like the Italians of to-day, never cared to pursue. So, however
much of the palm of early imaginative gardening and fantastic
play of irrigation belongs to the Romans, the adaptation of it to
Spain, and the use there of foreign and transplanted plants, seems
to have been purely Moorish.
The Moors were probably the only people in Europe in the
Middle Ages who made of gardening a feature of luxury, so
imparting into it a wayward charm not found in other countries,.
Plan of Maze in the Pavilion of Charles V.,
IN THE Alcazar Gardens, Seville.
A Gate in the Garden of the Alcazar, Seville,
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 75
where the mediaeval gardens of the same period were ecclesiastical
rather than princely, and where the most skilled horticulturists
devoted their best talents to the utilitarian grounds of monasteries.
One might almost assert that they were the only people who ever
conceived of gardening in a purely decorative spirit, from no
ambition to overpower Nature with the planting of parks on
artificial mountains, as in Babylon ; consecrating it to no deity,
cultivating their extended flora for no fashion of chaplet-weav-
ing, and combining the useful with the ornamental only as an
accidental detail. With the Moors, all their arts breathed only
fantasy, developed from the Roman school on a minutely delicate
scale, purely for pleasure, for the joy of living, of wandering
amidst scent so delicious that it " required a sigh to inhale it."
Never, perhaps, did a Moorish gardener in Spain dream of setting
off the beauties of leek and violet side by side.
But with this allusion to the humble leek or onion — classic
vegetable ! — it is curious to note how the taste and fashion for it
came and went among the Spanish kings. Alphonso of Castile
founded an order of Chivalry, the statutes of which forbade its
members the use of the onion, and those who dared to yield to
its temptation were exiled from court for a month. Yet in the
seventeenth century Madame d'Aulnoy remarks that the passion
for strong perfumes in food had reached such exaggeration that
at the procession of the king and his young bride through the
streets, "buffets" were erected along the route, and each person
held in his hand an onion, " de Tail, des ciboules dont I'air est
tout parfum6." Perhaps Owen Meredith was thinking of that
when he wrote :
"... The Spanish
Smell, I fancy, of garlic."
But, save in the flower beds of a Roman garden, the leek is
out of place among flowers, and the Moors delighted in perfumes
of a gentler kind : aromatic shrubs, thyme, myrtle, jasmine and
76 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
rose. The full meaning of what a Moorish garden can express is
all unknown to him who has never lingered within reach of this
mingled perfume, within sound of the peculiarly low ripple of
Moorish fountain or stream gurgling over brilliant tiles from
terrace to terrace, dark with the shadow of cypress or palm.
With the thirst of the desert in the blood, as it were, its un-
broken and often terrible silence unforgotten, the Moors built in
the midst of running streams, cool and unquenchably musical.
They luxuriated amidst a vegetation that knew no season : myrtle,
box and laurel, the shadow of palm, the gold of citron and
orange. Ah, Ternissa, how could you say, —
" I hate those trees that never lose their foliage,
They seem to have no sympathy with Nature,
Winter and summer are alike to them ? " ^
If these sites, in spite of their delicate beauty, were often the
scenes of treachery and tragedy, if for centuries garden and
battle-field in Andalusia never lay apart, and blood was shed as
freely as roses were gathered, vain is it now to seek for the
Caesar's life-blood in the colour of every rose. Let us seek only
for the breath of poetry, which is lasting and fresh as the flowers
of to-day's spring. Long after the glory of the Moors faded,
the wayward charm of their fountains and patios and orange
groves lingered on, and still
"Many a garden by the water blows."
Strongly characteristic as are these gardens of Spain, they
must have developed through stages almost as varied as Moorish
architecture itself, for the sources the Arabs drew from were
always as many as the countries they conquered. From the
flowery descriptions of the old Arab writers one might gather
that every garden was a vast " paradise," watered by numerous
streams and surrounded with walls, as vast as that in which
^ Imaginary Conversations. Landor.
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 77
Cyrus reviewed his Greek army ; such parks, in fact, as the
Persian kings and satraps surrounded their palaces with. The
grounds of Cordova and those of Baza may have been modelled
on this plan ; but such vast plantations were little adapted to
the palaces of the Moors and for their harems. Something at
once more fanciful than the classic gardens of a Roman villa,
less exquisitely natural than those of the Greeks, was needed to
satisfy the secluded life and monotonous social existence of the
Moorish interior. Whoever has glanced over the designs of an
ancient Egyptian garden — the only genuine desert garden — will
trace a certain resemblance to the long or square water-tanks,
planted on either side with rows of fruit trees, which repeat
themselves in varied designs from end to end, while all is en-
closed within a high wall. Whether across the Roman age the
Arabs gathered any inspiration from these cultivated oases is but
conjecture, but the expressions of all desert people, however
countless the changes rung upon them, all have a common root,
of which the ages never lose the thread.
Nevertheless, if we would understand the tangible characteristic
of the Moorish gardens in Spain, we must turn very especially
to Roman days for the architectural spirit which distinguishes
them. We English are said to talk of planting a garden ; the
ancient Romans talked o{ building one. This building spirit, which
expressed itself in terraces and courts, was the last outcome as it
were, though on so dainty and regulated a scale, of the architectural
tastes in the landscape gardening of the ancients, those mad
flights of an irregulated imagination which sought to toy with a
giant Nature as in the hanging gardens of the past. The pleasure
of " building " within a limited compass, terraces, pavilions,
fountains and streams ; of training the playful mystery of Nature
without any gigantic struggle with her forces ; is dwelt upon in
the description of Pliny's Tuscan Villa — a description to which,
once familiar with Moorish gardening, one may well turn with
78 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
infinite delight. '* In front there is a terrace laid out in different
patterns and bounded with an edging of box ; then comes a
sloping ridge with figures of animals on both sides, cut out of
the box trees, while on the level ground stands an acanthus tree,
with leaves so soft that I might almost call them liquid. Round
this is a walk bordered by evergreens, pressed and trimmed into
various shapes. . . . Almost opposite to the middle of the portico
is a summer house standing a little back, with a small open space
in the middle, shaded by four plane trees. Among them is a
marble fountain, from which the water plays up and lightly
sprinkles the roots of the plane trees and the grass plot beneath
them. In places there are grass plots intervening, in others, box
shrubs, which are trimmed to a great variety of patterns . . .
here and there are small pyramids and apple trees, and now and
then, in the midst of all this graceful artificial work, you
suddenly come upon what looks like a real bit of the country
planted there ..." and so on, till we gaze round at the laugh-
ing " architectura verde," the stiff eccentricity of the cut hedges,
and the " Images cut out of juniper or other garden stuff" which
Bacon condemns as only fit for children, the bits of natural wilder-
ness that peep from between the trim vistas, the fountains playing
so lightly from their basins, as though a laughing and classical
past had enchanted this tiny world of perpetual sunshine. . . .
After so long a lapse of time it would be impossible to affirm
how much of this garden of the Alcazar has survived the days of
the Moors. Their adaptation of the Roman aqueduct to their
peculiar love of fountains remains probably but little changed.
As in the Generalife and other gardens of Granada, so in the
bosquets and parterres of the Alcazar may be traced, says de
Prangey, *' an imitation, if not a direct continuation of the taste
that presided over Moorish gardens. What particularly dis-
tinguished them were their pieces d'eau^ usually square, some-
times long, with often a fountain in the centre, or sometimes
Fountain in the Garden of the Alcazar, Seville.
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN
79
even, as in the garden of the Chartreuse at Seville, a pavilion
open on all sides, and which recalls exactly the one Alberti
describes in speaking of
the sheet of water in front
of the Palace of Ziza in
Sicily." The fountains,
water jets, and cascades
still preserve their Moor-
ish features, for the tor-
tuous fashion of the
eighteenth century did
not change their site, and
I am inclined to think
that the true spirit of a
garden defies change as
resolutely as the Moorish
buildings resisted com-
plete transformation in
the hands of Philistine
princes. If the monu-
ments of the Moors lent
themselves easily to imi-
tation or restoration in
more or less doubtful
taste, the primal concep-
tion was difficult to lose
or hide, and even the ^
delicate intricacy of these
gardens have changed but
little, we may imagine, since the calm of Mohamedan fatalism
pervaded them.
The first impression made on entering the garden of the
Alcazar is enhanced by the strangeness of its approach. Passing
Cathedral, Santa Cruz, Bei-fm, Lisbon.
8o IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
the great tower of the cathedral a somewhat severe court is tra-
versed like a great Moorish vestibule shutting us, as it were,
from the reign of Christendom. Through vaulted loggia
and dark tunnel-like passage, the visitor emerges to the
flash of sunlight on golden walls and the tinkling waters
of a fountain, in whose dark green depths a bronze Hermes
is reflected profoundly. The vestibule this of some Aladdin's
palace, as if the god himself had evoked it from his own
dream realm. It would be difficult to do justice to the
subtlety of the art that has planned and elaborated this garden
and succeeded in placing such varied enchantments, and so
many vistas in so small a compass. Beneath the steps descending
from the fountain through a great bower of magnolia trees, is
caught the first glimpse of " architectura verde," flanked by
gaily coloured tiles, and the ear is ever enchanted by the murmur
of a tiny fountain below. But this little garden enclosed by a
high wall is only the prelude to a vaster one which by subtle
proportion and towering palms about its lofty central fountain
seems to suggest a dainty oasis. On no side can any suggestion
be obtained of the town which lies about, and on one hand a vast
wall, covered with an elusive mass of rococo structure, though
in itself of bad taste, seems only to add to the mysterious
illusion of distance.
Beyond the fountain, through another arched door a
remotely sheltered pagoda is seen. This seems the very
sanctum of the spirit of this exquisite oasis. Hidden away and
shrined by trees, screened as if from the intruder, it is perhaps
the very gem of the whole tangle. Charles V,, ambitious
Philistine though he sometimes showed himself to be, is happily
seen at his best in his additions to the grounds of the Alcazar,
and his building of a pavilion in their midst was in keeping with
the Moorish style. Such a conceit as this, surrounded by roses
crowding from every side, might well awaken in fancy the
The Canal in the Garden of the Generalife, Granada.
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 8i
mysterious palace of some Belle au Bois Dormant. What more
lovely fantastic sanctuary could be imagined for the centuries'
sleep of the royal maiden limned out in the old Germanic folk-
lore, but whose real origin, as has now been demonstrated, is
from the enchanted land of Oriental fable ? This tiny bijou
of the sixteenth century is indefinable in its lustre of Moorish
influence, a delicate hybrid in which the meeting of two races
seems to have produced for a moment an unique flower. The
blue tilework reflects responsively a sky which is of the Orient,
and the orange trees drop their fruits in the golden gleams.
Another exit from the central garden leads into the neglected
maze of myrtle, long robbed of all its mystery. But wild as
it is now ; no longer
" reduit secret
Qu'un art mysterieux semble voiler expres,"
there is a wonderful fascination in its vaguely scented alleys, and
still is it a happy landmark in the fashioning of gardens — happy,
since the outdoor life of the labyrinth is associated with the added
security of fifteenth-century pleasure grounds. It is a fitting bound-
ary to the garden's wing, this playful addition of the Spanish king,
but now no longer royal — just a gay haunt for the Sevillians on
their days of festa to race through its wild tangle with the laughter
of holidays, or sit and drink their harsh white wine and eat their
candied fruits on the tiled seats outside. One is tempted in this
only labyrinth of Spain to linger a while over the legend of the
maze, wondering why a people so geometrically inclined as were
the Moors, never sought to revive after its long centuries of sleep
the old labyrinthine imagination of the ancients, which would have
fitted so perfectly into the decoration of their walls and floors ;
or why the Roman use of it, whether serious or playful, never
inspired them. Only a little later and the spirit of the Renais-
sance, swayed by passionate love of mystery, seized upon this
emblematic expression, symbolising in it for a while the mystery of
82 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
life, till the maze became as the emblem of this world's complicated
paths surrounding its goal (the gate of Jerusalem), and these
*' roads to Jerusalem," as they were called, inspired the fashion of
working maze figures in stone or mosaic into the pavements of
many old French cathedrals. But symbolic mystery had no mean-
ing for the Moors, and the delicate imaginativeness of the maze
passed northward into England — that very land of mazes since
Roman days — not through the interpretation of Moorish arabesque
or garden fashion, but through French and Italian revivals. Alas I
the spirit of the garden labyrinth belongs now very distinctly to
the past, and there be few in our day, as an old writer says, "that set
their mazes with lavender, cotton spike, marjoram, and such like,
or isope and thyme, or quickset, privet, or plashed fruit trees."
For another specimen of an almost perfectly preserved
Moorish garden we must turn to the Generalife of Granada,
which lies separated by a ravine from the Alhambra, under an
overhanging point on which once stood the beautiful garden of
Dazalharoza. Whatever changes have injured the building of
the Generalife, the grounds, for some inexplicable reason, have
entirely resisted the desultory taste of later days, and are still, as
in the days of the Arab Dernburg, " the proverbial garden by the
abundance of its roses, by the clearness of its waters, the fresh
breath of its perfumed breezes." Entering by a little door we
pass beneath the dead white of the arcades, gleaming with the
peculiarly soft warm colourlessness of whitewash, like the
" plumage of a swan." The breath of flowers fills the long patio,
rising from the wild mass of brilliant blossoms on either side of
the canal. Passing along this, we skirt the Mauresque entrances
and reach the historic court where once stood
" Some young cypress tall and dark and straight, '
Which in a queen's secluded garden throws
Its slight dark shadow on the moonlit turf
By midnight, to a bubbling fountain's sound."
Architectura Verdk, Generalife Gardens, Granada.
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 83
And still a shadow lies there, cast by a queen's cypress, bowed
with silent years.
From the terraces and through the Mauresque openings of
the Generalift the most exquisite view extends. How often
must Fortuny have lingered here in those happiest days of his
life, enjoying the quiet and freedom of Granada which the big
towns denied him, the open-air atelier in which he worked alone
surrounded with perfumes and stimulated with its eccentric
beauty ; able, too, to look down upon the ruddy shell of the
Alhambra itself. " Figure toi," he wrote, " la Villa Borgh^se
au sommet d'une montagne entouree de tours moresques, et au
centre le plus beau palais arabe d'un tel luxe et d'une si grande
finesse d'ornements que les murs paraissent couverts de guipure."
It is impossible now to separate these haunts of Granada
from the memory of Spain's great modern painter. Fortuny
loved them all, and what the artist loves, passes into his work, till
those who see it dream also of what inspired it. Never was the
spirit of that work more exquisitely divined than by Thomas
Couture in a letter written a few years after Fortuny's early death.
" Oh, les belles choses ! j'en ai reve toute la nuit. C'est la
nature dans ce qu'elle a d'aimable, c'est la vie, c'est la lumiere,
c'est la floraison, c'est le coloris comme le fait Dieu par ses fleurs.
" II n'est plus de la peinture, ce n'est plus du travail, ce n'est
plus d'un homme. Des papillons ont frole ces toiles en y laissant
leurs parures, des fees ont presse les plus belles fleurs pour les
colorer. Tout petille de soleil et d'esprit, tout se transforme
dans ce prisma magique. Le vulgaire devient poetique, la satire
y devient aimable. La guepe comme la rose est du butin
empressee et les ailes fremissantes elle va raconter a ses amies
parfumdes nos laideurs humaines. . . . " ^
^ Letter written in 1875 to the late Mr W. Stewart after the artist's visit to
his gallery containing a collection of Fortuny's works. In the possession of Mr
Julius Stewart, Paris,
84 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Listen to the description of Navagero who visited Granada
in 1526, the very year of Charles V.'s visit to the old Moorish
capital, which so appealed to the artistic side of the king's
nature :
"Leaving the walls that encircle the Alhambra, we enter by a
secret back door into the beautiful gardens of the other palace,
which stands above and is known as the Generalife. This palace,
though not very large, is nevertheless an exquisite edifice, and
with its magnificent garden, and eaux d'artifices, the most
beautiful I have seen in Spain. Many courts it has, all amply
provided with water, the principal one being divided with a
canal of running water and full of lovely orange trees and
myrtles. A loggia or large * bellevue ' is there found, offering
a fine view, beneath which the myrtle grows almost to the
height of the balcony. These myrtles are so thick and leafy,
and lift themselves to such an equal height over the wall that
they seem like a green and abundant carpet. The water flows
through all the palace, and when desired even into the rooms,
some of which seem the most delicious summer haunts. In one
of the courts, full of rich and shady trees, is an ingenious water
trick. Certain secret conduits are unclosed until suddenly he
who stands upon the green plot of grass sees the water gushing
beneath his feet and over them, until again with the same
unseen touch the conduits are reclosed. There is also another
court beneath, not very large, but so encircled with dense and
luxuriant ivy that the walls are barely detected. This court
stands upon a rock surrounded with many balconies from
which extends the view far below to where the Darro flows. It
is a lovely and smiling scene. In the centre of this patio stands
a magnificent fountain with a vast basin. The central spout
sprinkles the water to a height of ten fathoms. The abundance
of water is amazing, and nothing can be more delightful than to
see the jets fall in drops. Only to watch how it is lavished on
In the Garden of the Generalife, Granada.
THE MOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 85
every side, and scattered and diffused through the air, is to
enjoy the grateful freshness.
" In the highest part of this palace there is found within a
garden a wide and lovely staircase, from whence one ascends to a
landing where, from a neighbouring rock, comes all the mass of
water distributed through the palace and grounds. The water
is there enclosed by means of many cocks and keys, in such a
manner that in whatever weather, in whatever way, and in what-
ever quantity desired, it can be turned on. The staircase is
constructed with such art that in descending every step is wider
than the one before, and in the centre of each step is a cavity
where the running water can flow and remain. More than this,
the stones forming the balustrades on either side of the staircase
are hollowed above in the form of pipes or canals. Of these
each has its cock above, so that the water can be made to flow at
pleasure, either by the canals on the balustrades, or by the
cavities in the wide staircase, or by both at once. The fall and
impetus of the water can also, if desired, be increased so as to
overflow the canals, bathing all the staircase and whoever is
thereon. A thousand other jeux d'artifices can be played. In
fact to me it seems that this site lacks nothing either of grace or
beauty, and whoever understands how to enjoy and benefit from
fair things, would live here in repose, solaced in the study and
pleasure fitting to a noble mind, and knowing no other desire."
The fatalist's limiting of" desire," restless or ambitious, is not
of our day, but the true sentiment of a garden is still and always
must be one of repose, and in no gardens is this so gently conveyed
as in those of the Moors. As the Italians have always expressed
in theirs romance or profit ; as the English garden emphasises
the "love of retirement that triumphs over taste," and that of
the French expresses the most exquisite and worldly elegance, — •
" . . . un jardin de Lenotre
Correct, ridicule, charmant,"
86 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
so the Moors mirrored in their pleasure grounds a peculiar sense
of harmonious gaiety, a monotonously restful variety which
shut the world completely away. The same dim sentiment is
found in the gardens of Algiers, Morocco and Tunis, the wild
tangles of jasmine and palm watered by simple irrigation — all
that the Arab interprets for the word garden. But even there
the rose blooms as the favourite flower, and wherever the rose's
deep petals mark the passage of the torn heel of Venus flying to
a wounded Adonis, the poetry of garden life, and of love and
sweet perfume, is at home.
Can the designing and planting of gardens be entitled
to rank among the fine arts properly so called ? If art
be a "corner of creation seen through a personality," it
would seem difficult not to extend its scope to the perennial
glories of a subtly conceived and happily executed garden. Who
can deny the strongly personal element in some dainty horti-
cultural work of the past, or resist the qualities they convey,
now of "allegra," now of melancholy, again of breadth, of finesse
or other attributes which we recognise as qualities of painting,
sculpture and architecture. A mystic language this to him who
can read, and who sees the genius of man expressing itself as
perfectly in composition of box-tree and yew, or in the weaving
of strange flower beds, as in groups of figures upon canvas or the
frozen limbs of marble statuary. Form, colour, arrangement,
all are here, but the palette glows with floral pigments, and the
twisted tree trunks are nature's own sculpture. Such is the
result, at least to the beholder, a vision of perfectly fulfilled art !
But it would be difficult to say to what extent the result which
seems so perfect and so expressive of one creative soul is in
reality due to a single originative brain. Gardens, like con-
stitutions, are not made, they grow ; and in the case of these old
gardens of Spain, it is but a playful labour to attempt to trace
the various steps and changes through which most of them have
Court of Lindaraxa, thk Alhambra.
THE vlOORISH GARDENS OF SPAIN 87
passed. It would be difficult to determ' e what of their delicious
beauty is due to the artificer and what tu chance, the strength of
nature, or the gentle hand of time ; and as before some old for-
gotten and mellowed painting we are enraptured, both by the
power of the painter who has produced and the kindly touch of
time which has embellished. At all events the fact remains that
old gardens like old pictures are apt to be the most beautiful, ex-
plain it who may.
Of the Generalife it would be difficult to say whether the
pensive thread or the joyous is predominant. Perhaps its
sympathetic charm reflects the humour of our own spirit, for a
garden is profoundly human ; it meets us as we meet it, willing to
" Take hands and part with laughter,
Touch lips and part with tears."
It is precisely the sombre note of some corners of this ex-
quisite haunt which brings into fuller relief the flowery vistas of
other spots, the light musical ripple of the tinkling streams
contrasting in an admirable chord of harmony with the sighing of
the wind in the dark cypress spires, making a light poem of
deftly felt contrast ; while the black shadows of the vaulted
arches of yew trees form a sombre note of mystery against which
stand out in laughing blaze of sunshine the clear-cut whiteness of
arch and whitewashed wall. The laws of art are eternally the
same in all its manifestations. As in the colour values of a rare
piece of Japanese lacquer, one is enthralled by the nuance of
artistic feeling which gives to tones, albeit beautiful in themselves,
an interpretation which passes to quite another plane of aesthetic
perception and unlocks the gate of dreams.
Were there space in so slight a chapter, it would be pleasant
enough to follow the track of Moorish gardens across the
Spanish frontier into Portugal. What Moorish influence is
petrified there ! Every building over a century old seems to
reflect something of its spirit as the people themselves still do
88 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to-day ; a something not lightly caught but ingrained in the
consciousness of the race. The Oriental interpretation of the
Gothic, the strange medley of architectural styles, meet us in
every old door and arch. And the gardens of Portugal — how
the Moors must have revelled in a vegetation so rich and so
Oriental ! Something of their Eastern spirit laid hold of Vathek's
author, when he let his imagination run wild amidst palms and
exotic perfumes, the tinkling of streams, the proud seclusion of
his home. But in this quiet corner of the Generalife it is a far
flight of fancy to think of that hanging wilderness smiling with
its perpetual summer over the stern Moorish haunts of stone
around. Such memories take us too far into another land, —
" A land where all the men are stones,
And all the stones are men."
There is a cult, half genuine, half artificial, in our age for the
study and story of old-time gardens. It has taken the wand of
centuries to instil into bygone pleasaunce grounds the seductive
melancholy that appeals to the poetry and art of to-day. He who
surrenders himself to the charm of these Moorish haunts in
Spain must be lover, not only of flowers, trees and fountains, but
of paths from which some figure has strayed into the past never
to return, of shadows flung by yesterday's happy sunshine. It is
the poetry of a brilliant age which must haunt him now in spirit
in these gardens abandoned but never sad.
" No se hallan en la paleta los colores de la tristeza ; " ^
But the colours that can breathe poetry are there. Poetic gardens
of Spain ! They are a landmark in the artistic life — a beautiful
inspiration.
"Days in the garden, why are ye so few ? "
' *' On thd palette are found, no colours of sadness."
Gate of the Two Sisters, The Ai.hambra.
CHAPTER VI
(iArabesque and <tdzukjo
"The function of ornament is to make you happy." — Ruskin.
There is a veritable language in the ornamental tastes of nations,
a happy language like the would-be words of music. This
expression of a pleasure-loving, colour-influenced people inscribed
in arabesque and artistic caligraphy on every Moorish wall has
imparted an artificial sunshine to Spain, a curious link between
the gloom of the Spaniard and the strong lights of the past. The
enjoyment of life and beauty in the North and West has never
expressed itself happily there in monuments. Italy herself, unit-
ing the extremes of artistic fervour and gay inconscience has left
nothing in building or ornament to laugh away the gloom of
time. But with a faint irresponsive reflection of Greek joyfulness
the *' composite " Moors, lowly as well as cavalier, allowed for six
centuries the sunshine of careless living to filter through their
walls. It is something for recognition, and should be counted in
their balance whenever this little understood people are assigned
their precise niche among the civilisations of nations that have
risen and passed away. For the psychological history of the Moors
still remains to be written. Though their hold on Spain covered
so many centuries the familiar terms of Moorish art and science
and philosophy are still vague when we try to give them concrete
form, as though we were but dealing with a shower of human
sparks lit up for a while by splendid worlds that were passing
away into space.
The ornamental spirit of Mauresque building in Spain, as far
M 89
90 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
as the purely native drift of taste and not culture counted, was
not Arabian. The Arab was and is a creature of simple inclina-
tions, while the Berber has ever shown himself influenced by dis-
play, a display which to-day vents itself in a passion for jewellery
and bright garments. The Berber dynasties of Seville and
Grenada encouraged the luxe of ornament till it reached the pin-
nacle of its possibilities, showing therein a distinct deviation from
the more restrained ideals of Abd-ul-Rahman's day. It was a
taste bound to reach excess and verge upon the disputed state-
ment that " ornament cannot be overcharged when it is good^
but is always overcharged when it is bad." That the Mauresque
style was held in check for so long showed the preponderating
influence of Persian and Oriental styles which held the secret of
gorgeous display without the destroying element of barbarism.
Arabesque, mosaic, the use of architectural forms in a purely
ornamental spirit — such as the adoption of the small pendentive
arches of India — and azulejo work, are the characteristic features
of Moorish decoration with which the bare structural shell was
transformed into a web of delicate beauty. The Mohamedans
of the Middle Ages were masters of the art of mural decoration,
uniting and perfecting all the varied processes of ancient
countries before passing them on westward in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Like some jeweller, master of his
art, Moorish ingenuity set the gems of antiquity into a new and
startling setting, hall-marking the fashions it favoured with its
own name. " Tout ce qui s'est fait en pays Musulman n'est pas
un fruit de I'lslam," but nevertheless all the arts borrowed and
developed by the Mohamedans became personal through the
bond of their faith, as well as by the law which permits new
energy from old roots. Seizing hold of every known decorative
art for their mural enrichment, the early weaving of native
tapestry was transformed no less with the " Arabs " than with
the Egyptians and Babylonians into a stone webwork which
Entrance to the BiBLioTHfcQUE Nationale, Algiers.
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO 91
rivalled in mystery as well as in beauty the textile wealth of the
palaces of Nineveh or Persia.
It is a matter of opinion whether form and ornament can be
judged separately, but can there be any doubt as to the verdict
on Oriental work? Its true spirit is colour, which uses form in
the sense of design only, and the use of stucco which gave it so
happy a field was understood in no debased way. Moorish
stucco, a hard and consistent plaster of which the secret is lost,
was laid on as is gesso on canvas, ready for the brush, and never
did it lose its virtue of truth by imitation of stone.^ Eastern
races are now — a little late in the day — admitted to have a rare
power over colour, and have proved that some of the highest
forms of art can express themselves through it no less than
through form. Like prose and poetry, form and colour overlap,
can separate or combine. "If we set ourselves to discover,"
says Ruskin, " in what races the human soul, taken all in all,
reached its highest magnificence, we shall find, I believe, two
great families of men, one of the East and South, the other of
the West and North, the one including the Egyptians, Jews,
Arabians and Persians. . . ." None of these races understand
form in its completion of beauty as well as strength, yet they
had mastered all the gorgeous subtleties of the rainbow.
Arabesque, a French term meaning " in the Arabian manner,"
and vulgarised when the art penetrated into France during the
Spanish wars of Louis XIV. 's reign, is the name now broadly
associated with the ancient as well as Arabian fashion of richly
decorating flat surfaces or low reliefs with — originality — textile
imitations, whose origin dates far back to the hieroglyphic en-
richment of Egyptian monuments. The term is now applied
to any fanciful and grotesque decoration painted on flat surfaces,
such as are found on the walls of Pompeii, in the designs of
Claude Audran in the Louvre or in Rafaello's Loggia. But this
^ Ruskin.
92 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
cinquecento interpretation of old-time classical ornamentation is
far more grotesque in inspiration than geometrical, and Rafaello's
exquisitely " artistic pottage of nymphs, cupids and satyrs," as it
has been called, has nothing in it of the true spirit of arabesque,
"Fine
With mysteries of inlaced design,
And shapes of shut significance,
To aught but an anointed glance —
The dreams and visions that grow plain
In darkened chambers of the brain."
Arabesque ornamentation, unfortunately, lends itself easily to be
vulgarised, and the fact that it often appeals without previous
culture to the ignorant, seems to rob it of a cult of electives ;
but the love of gorgeousness and display, of surface loveliness, to
which it appeals — that rudely artistic feeling found in the most
humble and ignorant of individuals — is not without its redeem-
ing quality in an age when the primitive richness of colour has
been overtoned down, and we often fear to admire what seems too
bright to have separated itself from some persuasive barbarism.
Let the Moorish temples of ornamentation in Spain or Africa
appeal to the mass or to the elect, let the Mauresque style over-
load the genuine arabesque, or the Alhambra ornamentation be
" used as shopfronts to the no small detriment of Regent and
Oxford Street," he who cares for the decorative spirit of a people
who by no means always sought to impregnate their works of
art with " soul," will find a delight in the humblest relics as well
as in the most gorgeous chefs-d'oeuvre of Spain and its mirrored
art across the water.
With the Arabs, whose earliest employed artisans seem to
have been Persian, the arabesque may have grown out of the
introduction of mathematics into Persia by the Saracens, the
development of caligraphy as a fine art, and the restrictions of the
Koran. The arabesque is distinctly textile in spirit, and wherever
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO 93
it flourished textile excellence existed also. The bright play of
woven threads forms the basis of Arabian art wherever it spread
or melted into other styles, and is the only characteristic which
the architecture of the Arabs preserved intact in all those parts
of the three continents conquered by the Mohamedans. Seated
upon the backs of swaying dromedaries,
" Camels tufted o'er with Yemen's shells,
Shaking in every breeze their light-ton 'd bells,"
the women, during the long journeys of the nomad tribes, spun
the fine threads of camel or goat's wool, while during the noon-
day and evening halts of the caravans they wove and embroidered
carpets and garments with all the fantasy which is said to appear
in the epic poems of the Arab story-tellers/
But it must be confessed that this native weaving of pre-
Mohamedan days is largely gathered from conjecture. Neither
story nor legend pictures for us an Arabian Helen or Penelope.
No Homer of the Desert sang of the warlike deeds or graceful
home arts of Arabia. Pliny himself is silent, and the sun-
browned fingers that wove those vanished stuffs were guided by
no motive of heroic figure or gallant act. But conjecture in this
case is nevertheless almost proof. Weaving is probably older
than any architectural system with every race of people. We see
the high-warp loom represented in the caves of Beni-Hassan as
we see it to-day but little changed at the Gobelins. We read of
the early monuments of Bible times hung with rich hangings,
and the otherwise rude walls of Assyrian buildings preserve in
solid stone or stucco the legend of a vanished but perfected
tapestry. All the designs and architectural imitations of textiles
of the great past embody the same tendencies as the Oriental
hangings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as of the
best Eastern work of our day. And it would be strange if the
I Reber.
94 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Arabs, even in their wandering existence, had reached no pitch of
excellence in their own weaving. The tapestry of the ancient
Egyptians, limited though it was to threads of cotton or linen,
through which it never reached a first importance, as with other
countries in their use of silk, must, as time went on, have been
as familiar to the Arabian merchants as was the weaving of the
Syrians or the Indo-influenced tapestries of Persia. But what-
ever foreign styles affected the industry of the Arab, it must have
possessed a very marked character of its own. From the absence
of any authentic command in the Koran against the introduction
into arts of the living forms of nature, we may gather that this
only art of the Arabian desert was as free then as afterwards of
human or animal forms, and may even at that date have dis-
played the ground-work for its geometrical after-excellence.
It is curious to think that an apparently narrowing misinter-
pretation of the Koran really developed the only feature of
Arabian art distinctly pure in its origin, however composite in
its growth. For had the Arabs trodden the beaten path of art,
endeavouring to build up a school of painting or sculpture of
their own, their inartistic fond would have been laid bare. The
branches of civilisation in which the Mohamedan people excelled,
such as those of decorative architecture, enlightened literature,
and even science, were all capable of expanding from the old and
inexhaustible fountains they had stirred anew, but the gifts of
painting and the plastic arts are gifts too inspired to flourish with-
out the sunshine of natural genius.
Is it the absence of this divine genius which lies like a
barrier between the arts of the Moors of Spain and those of
western nations ^ Many must confess to a secret confusion of
impressions when within the setting of Moorish ornamentation.
A something in human nature too often starved is over satiated
here, but something still more life-giving is absent. In the midst
of marble and hidden wood, glazed tiles and tinted stucco, which
Courtyard ok the BiBi.ioTHkyuE Nationai.e, Alcjiers.
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO 95
repeat exquisitely and untiringly the patterns of those textiles
familiar from earliest times to the Arabs, we are surrounded by
a perishable beauty which accident, not genius, has crystallised.
Nothing is real — arch or vault — yet all is fair,
'* . . . the enamelled cupola which towers
All rich with arabesque of gold and flowers ;
And the mosaic floor beneath shines thro'
The sprinkling of that fountain's silv'ry dew,
Like the wet glistening shells of ev'ry dye
That on the margin of the Red Sea lie."
The arches are fringed curtains or trefoil leaves, the structural
character is lost, the pillars seem to tremble with their own
slenderness. All is fantastic as a dream. So must it be enjoyed,
for it belongs not to our world of energy and stone.
Arabesque or Damaskeen work was originally carried out by
Persian artisans employed to decorate the mosque at Damascus,
and was doubtless in their case the effort to display architecturally
the varied and brilliantly-coloured designs of their own textiles,
those marvellous carpets of Persia on which gardens or " paradises "
were depicted, on which fruit and flowers often interlaced with
the graceful forms of antelope or bird, lay embroidered in all the
colours of nature. In spite of their early destruction of artistic
objects, the Arabs showed their taste for these carpets, adapting
them to their own dwellings as mural decorations or as carpets for
their mosques. The faithful Moslem took pride in possessing
rich stuffs worthy of kneeling upon in prayer with the head
bowed towards Mecca. But in accordance with the supposed
teachings of the Koran and with their growing horror of idolatry,
the inventive genius of the Persian workman, often accustomed
from even the humblest to work out his own design, must have
been severely checked. Whatever license penetrated with time
into the private palaces, the command to create nothing that
cast a shadow was certainly very generally followed, as much
96 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
from inclination as from religious obedience, and this primitive
inclination tended to develop to an extraordinary degree the
decorative forms borrowed from geometry, reducing even the
free tendrils of flowers and the curves of leaves to geometrical
laws. This combination of natural and geometrical design is
seen to perfection in Spain, Sicily and Persia.
It would be difficult to precise when and where elementary
geometry was first applied to decorative work. In the paintings
and sculptures of some of the oldest monuments of Egypt may
be traced geometrical curves and designs of a primitive kind, and
in Syria and Asia Minor, it existed in Christian buildings long
before the Arab invasions, and long before Mohamedan art
had converted this form of ornamentation into distinct styles.
Nothing can be imagined more effective than the arabesque com-
bination of severe and mystic lines and laughing colours. They
climb up to the very ceiling, here and there circling the capitals
above the slender columns twisted round and round with
sculptured rope. The weaving of verses or lines from the Koran
and elsewhere into the wall design was a custom also gathered
from textiles, and adapted with the other features of tapestry.
Among the Moorish kings the splendour of sovereignty was
enhanced by the weaving in gold or coloured thread of name and
kingly inscription into the texture of the royal " tiraz " or robe
which Abd-ul-Rahman introduced into Spain — a custom which
lasted as long as the Moors held the country.
So the fashion of wall decoration in imitation of hanging
textiles is one of the oldest to be traced in architecture. Less-
ing, the great Orientalist, says: "The alabaster reliefs, formerly
^ coloured, which cover every part of the palace of Nineveh, are
imitations of the magnificent embroideries of Babylon."
If, restricted to the interlacings of inscriptions and a continual
repetition of the same fantasies, not only by religious scruples
but by incapacity for producing natural forms, there should
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO
97
occur a strange monotony throughout Moorish interiors, it is
through this very monotony that a delightful sense of calm is
conveyed ; a distinct charm from the very use of the mould
which the great age of the Gothic has taught us rightly or
wrongly to despise. But where the Gothic worker had the
whole range of Nature from which to shape his imagery, the
Mohamedan artisan had nought but the intricate interlacings of
the mind, and his hand was held in check by bonds of which we
can hardly realise the severity. It is therefore doubly interest-
ing when, in wandering through the courts of the Alhambra, we
notice a budding leafage on the walls
struggling to throw off the geometrical
laws which bound fruit and flower as
well as conventional forms. The intri-
cate designs of the Persian lozenge, the
triangle and semicircle, seem gradually
to have formed themselves from the
careless stalks of flowers, and here and
there the growth of unstiffening leaves indicates a half uncon-
scious leaning towards the inspiration of Nature — a leafage of
spring which never reached summer growth.
The importance of the arabesque in decoration was early
shared by the use of tiles which the Arabs introduced into Spain.
The art of wall decoration with glazed tiles is so old and so
natural a development from the use of sun-dried bricks, that even
in primitive Arabia it must have been known, as it was so many
centuries earlier, in Egypt. The earliest kind made in Spain is
composed of a mosaic of tiny pieces let into the plaster of the
wall, much after the style of an old Roman pavement, and ex-
hibiting, like the arabesque, an infinity of geometrical designs.
Wherever the Arabs conquered, whether in Syria, Mesopotamia,
or Egypt, they found this. mosaic work had flourished, and one
of its happiest homes seems to have been Persia. The earliest
Design from Walls of the
Alhambra.
98 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
workers in the art employed by the Moors probably came from
Byzantium ; but so laborious and costly a form of workmanship
was soon replaced by the use of larger tiles in pure colours, and
of extraordinary resistance. One class of wall tile, or azulejo,
manufactured in Spain during the fourteenth century, continued
for long to suggest or imitate mosaic. The oldest of these
glazed tiles may be seen in the Alhambra, and show an infinite
variety of imagination, though they do not equal in brilliance
the green, black and azure blue fa'fence of the Cuarto Real.
Fortuny, during the years he worked at Granada, delighted
in this tile work of the Alhambra, and himself endeavoured to
reproduce the "reflet metallique," with some happy results.
He had the idea, as time wore on, of painting on faience, but his
busy and too short life gave him no chance of carrying out
his intention. Since his time another artist, the fantastic and
symbol-loving Rochegrosse, has ornamented his Moorish home
in Algiers with strange dim-coloured azulejos of his own design.
In most Oriental countries tiles for mural decoration were
used in the most magnificent way throughout the Middle Ages.
From the twelfth to the sixteenth century an especial kind of
lustred tile was largely employed for friezes, being frequently
made in large slabs and modelled boldly in relief. Later on, when
Italian arts penetrated into Spain, two schools of pottery were
formed, one traditional in its pure strong colours and geometrical
patterns, the other displaying all the characteristics of the Re-
naissance ; tiles of a coarse majolica showing the graduated tinting
and freer design, and the combination of blues and yellows which
are found in all later Hispano-Moorish works. These were prob-
ably the work of Italian potters settled in Spain, and were used
as freely for paving as for mural decorations. Splendid speci-
mens are found in the Alcazar at Seville, where the very gardens
are bright with the tiles of the seventeenth century, and even
earlier designs pave the sunny pavilion. Intruding among these
The ARCHfeVECHE, Algikks.
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO 99
paving tiles of Carlo Quinto's day may be seen the tiny imitation
of the old style of mosaic in the little maze in black and white,
itself no larger than an azulejo.
It would be difficult to overrate the influence of this tile
work on Moorish architecture, so beautifying is it and so har-
monious with the contrasting whitewash of the walls. It greets
us from every mosque and minaret along the coast of Africa,
gleaming, as in the mosque of Tangier, with the brilliant sacred
green of Islam, the " colour of the dawn." The colour green
plays a great part in Mohamedan decoration, and its sacred
character is as old as Egyptian story, when the special vesture of
Knmu, the moulder or fashioner of men, was depicted in green
upon the walls of Philae.
Lustred wall tiles, which must have influenced the Moorish
style, were employed by the Persians in the ornamentation of their
buildings from a very early date, and their mural faience is among
the oldest of the remains that have come down to us from the
early days of Islam. Long after the advent of the new religion
the Persians refrained from representing in their work any human
form or even floral design, but their artistic sense got the better
of their scruples, and by the sixteenth century unlustred tiles of
floral and animal design were freely used, and are still to the
present day. The large vase and bouquet of flowers extending
its design over a large number of tiles is found over and over
again in all later buildings of the Moors, especially in Algeria,
where, however, the Moors of the eighteenth century showed
their growing indifi^erence and ignorance of the use of mural
decoration by carelessly fitting the wrong tiles together, or — as
in the beautiful Archev6ch6 of Algiers — by turning them com-
pletely upside down. It would have been interesting to trace
whether the Moors of Spain, who were gradually adopting so
many of the customs of the Christians, would not, in time, have
developed more latitude in the designs and subjects of their
loo IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
mural arts. But their expulsion arrested what might have been
metamorphoses. The arts that they carried with them to Africa
retrograded, though whatever civilisation the Moors of Africa
acquired was owing to the Moors of Spain.
To turn from the brilliant period of Mauresque decoration
to this much later period which the Moors vaguely continued in
Algeria, carrying on the outcome of African rather than Arab
styles, it would be difficult to find a more interesting example of
late tile work and Moorish fantasy than in the Bardo of Algiers.
Here in the low-roofed chambers, bright with the revetment of
coloured azulejos, which replaced in this country the more
elaborate arabesque, may be seen the exact representation of an
eighteenth-century Arab interior, furnished with the bright
carpets and rugs, the low ** sufFahs," from which our own sofa is
derived, the octagonal tables and the familiar coffee tray of every
Moorish interior. Here and there, too, stands the large and
indispensable " coffre " of painted wood — that most nomad of
household articles — completing the list of furniture. This was
the dwelling of a rich Arab who sighed within his walls of Persian
blue and Italian tiles for the tent hangings of the desert, till came
the day when, overburdened with nostalgia, he locked up his
charming home ; closed the latticed windows of the harem which
looked down upon fountain and papyrus in the whitewashed
patio, upon the magenta Bougainvillea and the tiled pave-
ment ; hung the keys to his belt, mounted his Arab steed and
departed inland with his followers. On the way he met a foreign
acquaintance who accosted him with questions as to the fate of
his town home, learnt that it was to be sold, consented to pay the
round sum asked, and took immediate possession of it. The
Arab continued his way to the tent life of the desert, the patch of
ancestral sand in which he, like his forefathers, longed once more
to bury his wealth, untroubled by the fever of town life and its
eternally restless spirit. He, too, like his forefathers, loved the
ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO
lOI
" nursery of the world, but not the school." Arabs are justly
termed children of the desert. " Tout vieux qu'ils soient comme
peuple, ce sont de grands enfants."
Though Algeria possesses nothing belonging to the best
period of Moorish art, there are a number of villas reflecting the
old decorative tastes of
the Moors who had emi-
grated from Spain, which
have survived by some
miracle the iconoclasm of
our civilisation. Among
them may be named the
Bardo, the Bibliotheque
and Archev^ch6 in the
town, both genuine Moor-
ish dwellings ; the Villa
Mufti, and others upon
which new wings have
been grafted. It is true
that Algiers itself never
attracted the Arabs from
the interior, owing to its
liability to earthquakes,
while the internal disturbances between Berbers and emigrants
afforded no opening for the arts ; but during Turkish rule the city
was far too important not to absorb an enormous amount of wealth.
Those interested in the Mauresque style of decoration and
building in Spain will certainly not regret visiting the older
dwellings here,though he must do so without the aid of guide-book
or data of any kind, since the field of seventeenth and eighteenth
century buildings of Algeria has been totally neglected for the by
no means profoundly interesting Roman remains of the country,
in which the French archaeologists are still absorbed.
Papyrus in the Court of the Barbo, Algiers.
I02
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
j^
The origin of the Moorish decoration of doors with large
nails is difficult to trace. Nails were driven into doors by the
Romans for good luck, and the tradition may have been absorbed
by the Arabs, but the arrangement of the half orange nails in
regular patterns seems to be purely Mohamedan in origin. We
read of the twenty-four
portals of Cordova
which were studded
with Andalusian brass,
and in the old time-
eaten doors of the
mosque of Sidi Okba>
near Biskra, are geo-
metrical designs in
rough nails. Those
on the doors of the
Alhambra are famous
_ for their solid beauty.
It is a fashion which
has never died out,
and still we see the
doors of Toledo and
other parts of Spain
richly decorated with nails, rose-shaped or "media naranga " in
form. Many of these later-day nails, dating from the fifteenth
century, may perhaps have been the work of gipsies, who about
that time began to develop in Spain their special taste in iron
work. But if we know little of the precise origin of nailed
doors, the exquisite lacework of the latticed windows tells its own
tale of the secluded life of the harem, of the days when
" Through the silken network, glancing eyes
From time to time, like sudden gleams that glow
Through autumn clouds, shone o'er the pomp below."
Window at Valencia.
Courtyard ok the Bakuo, Algiers.
• ARABESQUE AND AZULEJO 103
Valencia is a very home of these delightfully decorative
windows, which lingered, no doubt, in various parts of Spain
with the close seclusion of women. The Infanta of Spain might not
show her face in the seventeenth century anymore than the Sultanas
of Granada in the fifteenth. And to this day Spanish girls of the
lower classes, duenna-less and no longer enthralled as of old with
the serenade which has been attributed in its origin to the Moors
themselves, still smile through the bars or lattices with slowly
flashing eyes, preferring to hear their lovers' whispers through
this old-time barrier than face to face. Nevertheless, in talking
of those lingering Moorish windows, beneath which guitars no
longer pause, and which seem, in the freedom of our day, so
prison-like, remembrance comes to me of a single Spanish love-
verse, not unfit to rise, as I heard it do, through summer air
and pass through those idle barriers, —
" Cuando voy a la casa
De mi quereda,
Se me hace cuesta abajo
La cuesta arriba,
Y cuando salgo
(De mi quereda)
Se me hace cuesta arriba
La cuesta abajo." '
^ " When I go to the home
Of my love,
I seem to speed down hill
Though the path leads above ;
But when I turn from her home
(The home of my love),
Again is the path a hill
That leads not above."
CHAPTER VII
Women of Spain and their 'Traditions
"^Well, to be sure, madam, you was born to be a saint . . . and there is no
resisting one's vocation. You will end in a convent at last."
— The Castle ofOtranto,
There is no denying that however familiar Spain and the life
thereof has now become to the world in general, one feature at
least remains elusive and shrouded in a comparative mystery —
the psychology and influence of Spanish women, past and present.
Whatever divergencies, social or otherwise, separate the Spain of
to-day from that of yesterday, in one thing history unites them,
in the obscure rSle women have played in their country's in-
tellectual and political story, and the immense influence exercised
by religious communities on their own lives. Mediaeval or
Renaissant, the convent is on every side ; in Barcelona, Alcala,
Avila, Toledo, Agreda or Seville, all are haunted with mystic
names. But convent life in Spain no longer displays its old
activity ; the cloistered nun has sunk to the level of a type, and
her erewhile inspiration is exhausted. " J'ai ete la rose, dit le
parfum, Je vous ai aimes, dit le cadavre. Je vous ai civilises,
dit le couvent. A cela une seule reponse ; Jadis." ' And it is
to that long ago that those who would analyse the Spanish woman
to-day must turn, since in spite of every change and every new
ambition, in spite of the curious vitality that underlies the super-
ficial life and literature of the country, the patriotism of the past
still holds its thrall over hearts and minds alike.
Spanish women travel but little, intermarry but rarely with
^ Les Miserables. Victor Hugo.
o 105
io6 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
foreigners ; know no longer the restless ambitions which at various
periods in the past stirred their sisters so deeply if often so vainly.
There are few liberal ideas that find a practice in their country, no
interest in politics, no woman's movement worthy of the name,
in spite of the encouragement of such an example as Madame
Emilia Pardo Bazan, and a large number of nineteenth-century
writers on social and educational problems, among whom Dona
Conception Arenal stands out as a veritable beacon of beneficent
light. Born in 1820, her first work in i860 attracted unusual
attention. The reform of prisons, the raising of the moral
standard among criminals, were the objects to which she devoted
an arduous life, and many of her works thereon have been
translated into various languages. " Such women," says her
biographer, Pedro Dorado, " are rare all the world over, but in
Spain they have been so rare, easy is it to count them upon the
fingers." Modesty, too, claimed itself as one of her virtues, and
when informed that a statue was to be raised to her name, —
" Statues," was her answer, " are only raised to savants, martyrs
or heroes, and I am none of these."
But though this popular social reformer achieved a practical
success in her writings, the world of literature — that natural
mirror of the progress of events in feminine ideas — is practi-
cally paralysed in Spain. No matter what value a work may
possess, the public greets it with an absolute indifference. No
criticism is vouchsafed it other than passing comments in second-
rate journals. Last, and not least, nothing is earned by the
writer, man or woman. The famous novelist, Valera, has cal-
culated that his most celebrated work of fiction, Pepita Jimenez^
has brought him in less than would purchase a ball-dress for his
wife. Madame Pardo Bazan herself, the most popular feminine
writer of the day, earns " de quoi vivre " through her immense
journalistic labour rather than through her important works,
while those works themselves often only cover their expenses by
^
A Street in Almeria.
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 107
a personal supervision of their sale, since the Spanish bookseller
is rather disturbed than otherwise by the parting with his goods.
If her Life of St Francis of Assist sold well, her projected work
on Caesar Borgia had to be abandoned on account of the ad-
ditional expense in the preparation of such a publication/
In fact, the public will only buy the cheapest form of
volume, and the bookshops are stocked with small one-
peseta volumes and absurdly miniature editions. We hear
so much of the wonderful advance made in Spain during the
last fifteen or twenty years, both in culture and enlightenment,
that reading between the lines of the representative novels of the
day, it is natural enough to search for the big ideas, the hopeful
suggestion of unrest. A certain amount of unrest and even
discontent is there, but woe to him who would keep the illusion
if he wanders through the bookshops of Madrid, turns over the
pages of the leading magazines (if he is fortunate enough to
find any), examines the preposterous amount of badly translated
foreign work ; who sees on the stage every trifling novelty
applauded into a transitory fame, while the works of dramatic
writers of a higher standard struggle with the dust of indiffer-
ence which collects inch-deep on all works of merit. Impossible
as it is to live by the pen, save in pandering to the most
frivolous side of dramatic art, or unless swayed by personal
ambition, as were certain writers of Queen Isabella's day ;
thwarted by the indolent press and the indifference of the public
to read, no wonder that the literary life of Spain is encompassed
within narrow limits, and the names of women writers are few.
What lacks in the Spain of to-day, says a French critic,^ is
neither the vein of originality or those capable of working it,
but the critic and above all the public. In Spain criticism,
which has reached such an exhausting excellence in other
^ La Renaissance Latine, Nov. 1904.
^ Propos d' Espagne. E. Martinenche,
io8 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
countries, seems to be reserving its forces for a future in which
more than half the inhabitants will be able to read, and the
Budget of Public Instruction shall have given them the where-
withal to do so.
Be it but a " parrot's cry," the women of Spain seem still
familiar to us only as types. With the songs of the French
poets in our ears, we find in Andalusia only the typical woman to
whom they sang. Andalusians " a Fceil lutin," pale with a warm
and lovely pallor, fascinating, unintelligent, with the undulating
walk of their country, the small hands and feet for which they
are justly renowned, the harsh voice which grates cruelly over
their exquisite "language of love," and always a certain nameless
but coarse charm even when beauty itself is quite absent. The
most enthusiastic of writers on the life and women of Andalusia,
Madame Fernan Caballero, herself insists on this familiar type,
giving it nothing new, only the eternal picturesque, the inexhaus-
tible fervour of Oriental natures. But familiarity with a country's
types is only of interest when those types show up the individu-
ality they can produce in their midst, the talents and powers of
those who separate themselves from the mass, not merely the
typical beauty to which the praises of a Byron or a de Musset
were given, a beauty as material as it is often striking.
Touching the question of personal endowments of Spanish
women, Howell writes in the seventeenth century : " Nature hath
made a more visible distinction 'twixt the two sexes here than
elsewhere ; for the men are for the most part swarthy and rough,
but the women are of a far finer mould ; they are commonly
little, and whereas there is a saying that makes a complete
woman, * Let her be English to the neck, French to the waist,
and Dutch below,' I may add for hands and feet let her be
Spanish, for they have the least of any.' Eyes and hair are their
chief beauties, and the ringlets of Eleanor of Castile defied, it is
said, the tight cambric helmet which the fashion of her day
^■i n /
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 109
ordained. But Spanish beauty, as we understand it in its most
poetical sense, is rare — perhaps always was so — in spite of the
Mission of Beauty which played its important part in the Spain
of the Renaissance no less than in Italy. The very air in those
days was still charged with the fantastic luxury of Moorish
harem life, and the Oriental
interpretation of aesthetics,
but the type most admired at
that period showed a curious
divergence from what might ^'^
have been expected as the na- ^
tural outcome of a luxurious
and sensual age, reflecting
strongly the violent transfor-
mation of the people's tastes
and ideals, the same ecstatic fer-
vour which was finding expres-
sion in their religious feeling.
For long the style of beauty
most admired though most
opposed to that natural to the
women of the country, con-
sisted of " a face of aristocratic
oval, a swan neck, a wasp waist ; in short, a general eflPect of
reed-like slightness and fragility, a veritable mantel ornament, so
delicately balanced that to touch it was more than one dared,
and then puzzled how so frail a thing could manage to stand
on such tiny feet, to hold out such a poor little hand " — a
virginal figure of youth, an absurdly pure type, which for long
persisted in Spain side by side with the more sensual beauty
which Italy favoured. But with time Spain reverted to her
natural tastes, and the full-blown rather than the slender damsel
was reinstated in favour, " women full and big-lipped, which is
./
A Girl of Seville.
no IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
held a great beauty rather than a blemish, it being a thing in-
cident to most of the race." ^
However pure the former type of womanhood may have seemed
to the exalted eyes of that time, there was something profoundly
unhealthy in the development of Spanish women in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Mysticism became to them as the
breath of life. The very colours chosen for their garments,
and which influenced the gay fashions of France, became
mysterious and sickly, and their names still fill one with
dismay. " Couleur d'Espagnol mourant, d'Espagnol malade,
P^ch6 mortel, Triste amie, Face gratt6e," such hues stand out
with alarming tristesse from the healthier rainbow of " cramoisi,
couloumbin, et aurore," and bear their witness to the weird changes
through which the Spanish psychology was passing. In spite of
the simple and unsensational life inculcated by Anne of France
and propounded in Spain, in spite of the "perpetual fast" of the
Christian life which Viv6s encouraged as a regime to combat the
flames of the heart, violent emotions continued to be played upon,
hearts were lost in the nursery, religious vows taken before a child
had ceased to play, women of twenty-five looked as old as women
of fifty in England. One may wonder how the ladies of that time
could ever care for so pure a pleasure as the gathering of May dew,
or how an English prince in search of a bride had ever such good
fortune as to discover an Infanta in so unemotional a pastime.
With the uniting of Castile and Aragon and the violent
religious fanaticism which bound these two naturally antagonistic
divisions of one country together, the people of Spain, men and
women alike, had passed as it were, —
" From lethargy to fever of the heart,"
a fever which in their country scorches rather than warms,
stimulates rather than feeds. Intellects as well as hearts were
^ Howell.
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS iii
aiFected by this fire. It produced enthusiastic students rather
than philosophers. Women of a new type seemed born, unable
to satisfy their eager lives with simple food, searching with
avidity for new truths and finding nothing but old, and drawn,
as though worn out with the struggle, towards the cloister, "le
lieu etrange d'ou Ton aper^oit, comme d'une haunte montagne,
d'un cote I'abtme ou nous sommes, de I'autre I'abime ou nous
serons." This seemed the end of every effort, of the active and
exemplary life, of the ambitions of youth, of the adventurous
and most thoughtless sinner. Immorality itself seemed exalted
by the violence with which it was swayed, wavering with strange
yearnings between the temptations of the Devil and the pas-
sionate voice of Religion. Often both seemed to go hand in
hand, both sworn foes yet inseparable, both torn with human and
spiritual emotions. Men and women alike were living volcanoes,
and even to-day, from end to end of Spain, those volcanoes are
still around us, only seemingly extinct beneath a lava of indiffer-
ence, of freethought and modernity.
The emotional life was bound to go hand in hand with this
religious fervour. It marked the barrier between the old days
of rude and simple chivalry and the new life of passionate
ecstasy which, after inspiring the entire Spanish nation, gradu-
ally paralysed both sexes, till the words of a poet of the day sang
to the gulf that now lay between them : —
'* Where are the brilliant knights and the many fantastic in-
ventions of their day ? The jousts, the tournaments, the
trappings of the horses, the embroideries, what are they now
but illusions ? What are they but as a vision of green pastures
in mid-air ^
" Where are you, brilliant women, with your head-dresses,
your exquisite robes, your bewildering perfumes? Where are
those flames you once lit in the hearts of your followers .? All
the songs of the troubadours and the tunes that echoed the
112 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
tender words? All the dances and the stuffs that entranced
with their glamour ? "
The exaggerated wording of the Arab poets themselves had
crept into the style of the Spanish writers. Flowery descriptions
and gorgeous display were features no less of the Spaniards than
of the Moors of Spain, but if the same exaggeration was reached
by the ladies of the Spanish court as that which characterised
their sisters of the harems, there was about it something less
natural to their gloom of race. Writing of the luxury of
his countrywomen's dress, the historian, Ibn ul-Khatib, con-
demns it as a madness. He describes the lavish use of perfumes,
the folly of the women, especially those of rank, in decorating
themselves with hyacinths, chrysolites, emeralds, and other stones
and ornaments of gold ; till such was the variegated splendour
of their appearance when in the mosques, that they have been
likened to the flowers of spring in a beautiful garden. No
doubt such language points to a luxurious and effete style of
life and an Oriental standard for women, but the place taken by
beauty and luxury amidst an Oriental people does not indicate
the decadence which it might do in a western nation. The effete-
ness of Moorish Granada is often quoted as instrumental to its fall,
yet, perhaps, its degree of extravagance did not surpass that of
Cordova or of the Abbasside capitals. The lavish wealth of
harem and chivalric life in Spain in those days went hand in
hand with a brilliant period in the intellectual history of Arab
women. Female seclusion introduced during the reign of
Walid II., continued to allow of extraordinary freedom in
their lives, and Cordova was a city of female students and in-
tellectual leaders of salons, as well as a city of poetesses, and
fathers were often proud to bear as surname the title of some
gifted daughter. In those elastic days the very slaves of the
king were poets and scholars, while even a freedwoman, unaided
by rank which counted so much among the Arabs, could write
'^■^
Algeciras.
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 113
her works of rhetoric and expound her theories. A circle of
brilliant women, Aixa, Hafsa, Hinda"la jougleuse," all wrote
their polished verse. Walladeh, unmarried and living to a
great age, excelled them all with her poetry, her reunions, her
patronage of literature and art, while the historians of her day
filled their works with anecdotes of her beauty and talent.
Princesses and ladies of rank gave musical soirees /joined in the gay
movement of social life, tried their skill in such games as tennis and
rackets, practised archery, and only when too large a number of pro-
fessionals had deteriorated the graceful art of dancing, was that
amusement confined to certain classes, and the pretty Moorish
dance, the Zambra, was laid aside by the ladies of the royal harems.
After the fall of Cordova, in the midst of the great turmoil
of the eleventh century, when the social and political fabric of
Western Asia was almost falling apart, women continued to be
the object of chivalric attention, and the Mohamedan capitals out
of, as well as in Spain, counted many a scholastic woman in their
midst : lawyers, expounders of the Koran, musicians and Latin
poets. Again, in Granada, chivalry of every kind found a con-
genial home, and as in the capitals of the Caliphs, women occupied
a prominent position, mingling in the society of men and assist-
ing at the feies and tourneys in which all the mediaeval world.
Christian or Moor, revelled. Able as they were to take their
share in the thought of the day and to hold their own in whatever
branch of culture they chose to pursue, though always without
the faintest reclame, no doubt such women, as witty as they were
handsome, had an ennobling influence on the gallantry and
chivalry for which Granada was so famous. If little more than
" the shadow on the grass " seems to remain of this Moorish
dream of fair women, we must remember that it is contrary to
Oriental pride to give publicity to those they may cover with
praise. The women of the Moorish age in Spain were, probably,
unambitious, had little stimulus from the great world, but if they
114 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
sought the intellectual life from the midst of their secluded courts
of love, it showed, not only that their minds had an intellectual
drift, but that the men of that time found a charm in the com-
panionship of educated wives, and must have encouraged it.
Such, then, were the women who, even from the far-off
seclusion of Granada and athwart the natural barriers of race and
religion, must have influenced those of Spain in countless ways
and for long to come. But with the last exodus of Moorish life
from the country, that influence became for a time lost sight of.
With the new impulse of the Catholic sovereigns, the feminine
life of Spain underwent a radical change. The influences of the
Andalusian Moors, the still deeper eff^ects of the Jewish race,
were combated with a sudden mad determination ; a new direction
was taken by all, a new type developed, and until such characters
as those of Saint Theresa, of Maria de Agreda or of Aloysia
Segia, have been studied, the emotional story of Spanish women
can be but imperfectly understood, nor can we account for the
obscure and strangely impalpable part played in history by char-
acters so endowed and so powerful. Typical types these of a
strange, conventual age — mystically intellectual saint, mysteriously
self-deluded and deluding nun, and woman of the world, whose
life of '* savant " seemed ever drawn towards its missed vocation
till, spiritually if not practically, convent walls encompassed her.
The nun, Maria Coronela, born in the little river town of
Agreda, if not intellectual, had strange powers. After ecstatic
revelations she and her entire family of parents, sisters and
brother embraced the religious life ; but if all were probably of
weak and impressionable intellect, this nun must have possessed
in a developed degree all the ecstatic qualities of her age. Strange
was the influence she acquired over the mind of her reserved and
unhappy monarch, and stranger still, for a woman of her country,
was the intriguing interest she displayed in politics. For long
after her death the trial as to the sincerity of her inspiration in
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 115
her sordid Life of the Virgin Mary continued to rage, but
though time has told against her memory, the word " impostor "
seems out of place for such a woman in such an age. Who
could venture to say in those centuries, " That vision was never
seen, such a stigma never worn ? " The women of Spain have
fed on those visions ever since. Even in our day a character so
modern as that of Fernan Caballero can hardly be understood as
a writer save through the mystic influence of those who have so
typified the psychology of their kind that a popular and narrow
novelist of the times is but an echo of that passionate past, the
worn reflection of its great characters. Even the unbalanced and
unprincipled Sister Patrocinio of the reign of Isabella II. becomes
a feeble echo of the wonderful personalities of women who, in any
country and in any age, would have stood out as remarkable.
But of the women who, resisting for a while at least, the call
of the cloistered life, wrote and studied and composed with such
masculine ambition in an age of avidity for all learning, of those
who wore crown or laurel wreath — what do we know? Little
more than the merest echo of their lives have come down to us,
from the days of Isabella to those of the Empress Eugenie. Im-
possible to turn to France without a haunting vision of names
made famous by right of brilliant gifts, of wit, of social power,
of tragic fate ; or who, with some scandalous notoriety, yet
managed to reflect with it the very atmosphere and taste and
glamour of their age. Impossible to wander through Italy un-
accompanied by the Poets' Muses, by some mysterious Lucrezia
Borgia, some tragic Cenci, some female fiend or political intrig-
ante. But in Spain the women of the past hide behind ghostly
veils. In spite of their proud vitality they have come down to
posterity without the pulse of life. They shone in no brilliant
salons. There have been no Jeanne d'Arcs to wave on high a
patriotic banner ; no Madame de Pompadour to throw a halo
of art and letters over a corrupt court ; no Madame d'Aulnoy to
ii6 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
write shrewdly of what can catch only the woman's eye and mind ;
no Lebrun or Angelica Kauffmann, unless we liken to them the
obscure Maria de Ararca, the contemporary of Velasquez and
Rubens, both of whom admired her work. " Dona Maria de
Mendoza, the pretty Isobel of Cordova, far richer in Latin,
Greek and Hebrew than in worldly possessions ; Catherine
Ribera, the bard of love and faith ; the two professors of rhetoric
at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcala ; Beatrice of Galindo
who taught the Queen Latin ; Isabella Rosera, who preached in
Toledo Cathedral and went to Rome to convert the Jews and to
comment on Scotus Erigena before an array of dumbfounded
cardinals ; Aloysia Sygea, again, the most illustrious of them all,
an infant prodigy to begin with, then a Father of the Church, who
could speak the most outlandish languages. These were women
full of sap and energy, whom no one was astonished to see taking
by main force the first rank in the spheres of literature,
philosophy and theology."'
But their very names are unfamiliar to us now, and their
works, where are they? The mystic savant, Aloysia Sygea, half
French but wholly Spanish in her endowments, was doomed for
long to unjust notoriety through a disreputable work passed off
under her name. But of her own writings, all the results of an
advanced classical education and hard study in the very midst of
the distractions of court life, what do we now know save that they
never probably saw the light, and that, in the words of her
epitaph, *' Her modesty rivalled her knowledge of languages."
As to the enormous amount of work accomplished by Beatrice of
Galindo, or La Latina, as she was called by the Queen, it was
never published. Widowed while still young, childless, im-
mensely rich, her many gifts were consecrated to the religious
life, to the building of convents and hospitals (one of which still
' Femmes de la Renaissance. R. de Maulde de Claviere. Translated by
Geo. H. Ely.
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 117
bears her name in Madrid), in fact to the contagious renuncia-
tion of the gifts of life, which was half malady, half religion, in
those days. Given the gifts which the world was crying out for,
and which the life of the monastery could no longer find full
vent for, as in the earlier centuries of conventual power, the re-
nunciation made by the many talented and unusual women of
that day seems curiously strained and overwrought. If the
mysticism of their characters became world- famed from their
choice, the intellectual life was arrested. So many gifts that
seemed divine in the midst of men became too human for a
community of exalted ascetics ; much, in fact, that was real, was
sacrificed for shadows. 1 1 was the age of intellectual martyrdom,
of majestic error, but in contemplating it from a healthier though
less exalted standpoint, the exquisite words of Victor Hugo in
his analysis of convent life, seem to soothe away all questioning ;
" Le sacrifice qui porte a faux est encore le sacrifice. Prendre
pour devoir une erreur severe, cela a sa grandeur." Sublime
words which help towards the comprehension of a people's
mystic greatness, forcing life's vocations in homage of their
stern motto — " Suffer or die." So, gifted in no ordinary degree,
following in the wake of their first brilliant Queen, in the very
shadow of the Moorish days when female intellect and talent had
always shone with a bright if spasmodic light in Moorish Spain, the
most renowned of the women of Spanish history hid their lights
under mystic veils — veils that time has rendered yet more opaque.
So, too, in spite of the extraordinary amount of freedom
which allowed women to show learning unabashed, in spite of
the seclusion of their social life, their flights of imagination
and of intellect seemed ever checked as by some mysterious in-
terference, till mysticism itself became the crowning attribute of
their age, and Saint Theresa, swept away at the age of six, '* by
the violent movement of love," becomes the ideal of all her
countrywomen for all ages. Even as far on as during the reign
ii8
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
of Isabella II. this indication of unfulfilled promise, of arrested
effort, is still to be traced, now through the enchaining legends
of the past. The young dramatic writer,
Gertrudis Gomez de Avelleneda, lyrical and
romantic writer, who first had the courage as
a woman to brave the indiscriminating criti-
cism of her country and produce a work for
the stage, never fulfilled her promise of suc-
cess. First a slave to the past, then, after
years of convent life, endeavouring once more
to take up the threads of love and romance,
she was a typical example of the Spanish
woman of ambitious gifts, who refuses to
belong to her century.''
It is to the cloistered and narrow life of
the convent, rather than to the brilliant light
of court, to the Book of Saints rather than
to that of history or even of romance, to the
pulpit, not to the scholastic chair, that those
who would follow the emotional story of
women's lives and work in Spain, must almost
inevitably turn. To the convent all intellect
has tended and still tends by tradition. In it
is hidden the real power of Spanish women
in the past, whether that power be of mere
intrigue, intellectual ambition or religious
fervour. In it has thrived as nowhere else
in the world a mysticism at once wonderful
and horrible, a picture of the female soul and of intellectual
bondage, which even to-day can hardly be gazed upon without
fear, so dark yet luminous a mirror is it for soul and mind, for
the sublime soaring of the one, and the self-torture of the other.
' Histoire de la Litterature Contemporaine en Espagne. Gustave Hubbard.
Cloister, San Juan los Reyes,
Toledo.
WOMEN OF SPAIN AND THEIR TRADITIONS 119
The convent, generally speaking, seems an austere, a cold
enough place at best. It shuts out the joy of living, the natural
warm-bloodedness of life. Once the oases of civilisation, ** good
in the tenth century, doubtful in the fifteenth, useless in the
nineteenth," its use in the world has diminished, and with its use
its fire. But Spanish women bequeathed to it a far different
character, till the world that it shut out seemed cold in comparison.
The story of convent life in Spain is the story of hearts as well
as souls — a terrible romance of passionate natures carried away
within *' the soul's sphere of infinite images."
In the North natures become austere and calm under the
influence of the spiritual life. In Spain, on the contrary, they
were exalted to a pitch of nervous agony, a spiritual sensuality
which alike wore out body and soul. Nothing can be imagined
at once more human and exalted than the life of Saint Theresa,
that enthusiastic reader of romances as her mother had been
before her, swayed by all the hunger of a girl's heart for admira-
tion, for pleasure, dress, and love ; battling against them all with
the book of a great fellow-sufferer in her hands, the Confessions
of Saint Augustine. Her personality still penetrates her native
town, and Avila is lifeless without the mysticism of her age,
which clings still to its Carpaccio-like beauty ; and still, through
one of the town's ogive-arched portals, we seem to see an eager
child and her brother running swiftly in the direction of Sala-
manca in search of a fantastic martyrdom for love of Christ. If she
is called a " love-sick nun," there have been thousands such, but
few women like Saint Theresa.^ In religion she raised the ideal of
sentiment by a new eloquence, obliging feeling to replace reasoning.
Gifted as she was, powerful writer, poet, energetic leader of souls,
never did she bring to bear the least of her reasoning powers upon
her religious teachings. Spain alone could have produced such a
woman, the convent only could have given her a wide enough field.
The mysticism oflove,and love only,swayed her being, and through
' Mrs. Jamieson.
I20 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
her has swayed countless others. This poet-mystic has breathed
forth her wonderful capacity for divine devotion in her famous
sonnet, of which the following is only a rough translation ; —
" I am not moved at heart, O God, to love Thee
By the radiance of Thy promised Heaven,
By the terrors of Thy Hell's depths even —
I do not feel their aweing power to move me ;
'Tis Thou, my God — only to hear Thee sighing
Nailed upon the cross with shrinking body,
— Moves me to see those piteous wounds so bloody,
Moves me to see the anguish of Thy dying.
I am in truth swayed by Thy love so surely
E'en without Heav'n's promise I would revere Thee,
E'en without Hell itself still would I fear Thee —
Nor could I — hope or fear — love Thee more purely.
Without Love's hope, or Love's divine fear proving.
Still must I love Thee, God, with the same loving." ^
Such were the women for whom the life of the convent in
Spain seems especially to have thrived. Whether they made it,
or it them, opinions may well differ, but without that monastic
existence, which vaguely centralised the intellectual life of the
day, such types could only have passed into the vortex of emo-
tional fire, leaving ashes behind. It is owing to the religious
existence that something of their majesty has been preserved ;
and on this traditional majesty the women of to-day, good, bad
or indifferent, worldly or unworldly, little or much endowed,
are still formed. The qualities that fitted them for a past age
are still insisted upon, the writers of to-day are yet proud to
portray the old workings of the mind, the same shadows. In
Spain respect for the past is a disease, and as long as it ferments
beneath the smooth modernised surface, who can say what are those
women of Spain. Let them, rather, declare with their old pride :
" Who shall say what is said in me.
With all that I might have been dead in me."
^ Translated from the Spanish.
A Road in Gibraltar.
CHAPTER VIII
In the Shadow of Islam
" In the soul of me sits sluggishness ;
Body so strong and will so weak,"
— Ferishtah's Fancies. Browning.
The strip of classic water that divides Spain from Africa seems
little more than a channel when on some clear day the opposite
coast is detected from Tarifa. From there, beyond the white-
ness of the Tangiers buildings, we see in imagination a jutting
garden outlook, a flower-perfumed bower above the lapping
waves, from which the hills of the peninsula are visible. In
Algeciras, with its cactus and geranium hues, its intense quiet,
its sweet and dreamy air, we find a kind of bay window, as it
were, from which to look out of Spain with mind as well as
eyes ; where the half invisible distances seem to be continually
drawing both towards something new. From here, so near the
limits of the western world
" In quella parte ove surge ad aprire
Zeffiro dolce le novelle fronde,"
that aggressive Ceuta is dimly seen, where the young Camoens
first tried his arms against the Moors, and from which, eight
centuries earlier, Tarik, with his handful of Ceuta Berbers,
organised his invasion of Spain. To Tarik, legend gives the
credit of the first blow ; to Musa, with his Medina followers, the
glories of conquest ; to the Berber Julian the help needed for
their success. Tarik the hero, Musa the saint, Julian the
traitor, they all measured from there the dancing barrier between
them and the land of their ambitions, far too narrow a
mirror in those days for Cross and Crescent to reflect their
Q 121
122
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
symbolic lights within, without kindling fire. But, as time has
proved, " El Islam is essentially an Asiatic form of belief, and
could not progress beyond the limits opposed to it by geography.
Not having a St. Paul to modify it, to change it, the Saving Faith
tlfifL
Old Moorish Walls, Tarifa.
broke upon the rock of a new race." ' Nevertheless Islam main-
tained itself in Spain for a long time, and has left many an echo of its
influence to clash with western progress, or to remind us of how
continually an obliterated force leaves something of vitality behind.
" A stick, once fire from end to end ;
Now, ashes, save the tip that holds a spark,
Yet, blow the spark, it runs back, spreads itself
A little where the fire was. . . ."
^ El Islam. Sir R. Burton.
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM
123
Indeed, who that has wandered through Southern Spain has
not asked himself from whence arose the strange fanaticism
which has crystallised the Spaniards, as Islam has the Arabs.
Does it originate in the people or in their religion ? There is
certainly a curious analogy between the two races in the effect
their creeds have had upon them. They too, like the Arabs, were
spurred on by a *' Holy War," invaded countries and built up an
Empire which crumbled away. For a v
brilliant period after their faith had \
triumphed by the sword, literature, the
arts and science, all flourished. But as
with the Arabs their religion was fol-
lowed by coercion, by absolute dogma.
The Arab Inquisition was closely fol-
lowed by that of Spain, till, after a brief
reign of splendour, it likewise crushed
the people's life ; and Mohamedanism
and Spanish Catholicism have both fol-
lowed the same course, "liberal quand
il a et6 faible, et violent quand il a 6te
fort." Both races have allowed a false interpretation of their
creed to obscure the light of intellectual progress, and the word
" Fanaticism," which European races have monopolised to de-
scribe the condition of Mohamedan countries, embraces with no
less truth the lands where the Mohamedans colonised.
Certainly the study of fanaticism in religion in all its varied
phases, whether among the Jews of the Bible, the Christians of
the Middle Ages, or the natives of Arabia and Africa, is full of
curious interest, and we see how especially it has ever affected
certain qualities of human susceptibility, and always in the same
way — either in a disregard to, or delight in physical suffering.
The Arab's insusceptibility to pain, owing to religious fervour, is a
strong mtntal chloroform induced by fanaticism, and encourages
Portico of a Church at Ronda.
124 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
a decay of nervous power, a physical dulness which is closely allied
to mental sleep. So in Mediaeval Spain the delight in voluntary
martyrdom or in the tortures of the Inquisition was the form that
Spanish decadence took with its increasing fanaticism ; and to-day,
in certain parts of Andalusia where the fanatical spirit of northern
Africa lingered the longest, in Seville, Granada, and far from least
Ronda, the pleasures of the bull-fight, from which all the spirit of
sport and equally pitted struggle has been removed, is, perhaps,
a distinct outcome of the same quality, the deadening of certain
subtleties of nervous life, which corresponds with a mental decline.
For morally and intellectually the hypnotism of African fanaticism
is on the people of Andalusia still, not only on their art and customs.
El Islam is spoken of as powerful in its influence upon the races
professing it, but the influence of the Arab on his religion is
much more remarkable. So in Spain, though
" The cross is sparkling on the mosque,
And bells make catholic the trembling air,"
we trace the same force, the degradation of the people who have
made a Koran of their Bible, a besotted interpretation of their faith.
*' Les religions valent ce que valent les races qui les professent."
In three countries, in Southern Italy, in Andalusia and in
Portugal, the worship of the Virgin has been allowed to reach
such an extreme of exaggeration that the very expression of
praying to God, common to the language of all other Catholic
countries, is unknown there. As long ago as the sixteenth
century, Cervantes in his great work made an efibrt, though a
covert one, to draw attention to the drift of events, but in vain.
The spirit of exaltation which had lent such colour and heroic
meaning to the religious struggle of Moorish Spain — even to the
most unreasoning and vain acts of worship and martyrdom — was
early debased to a sentimental frenzy in Andalusia, a distinctly
Oriental sensualism which even the pure beauty of Murillo's
canvases could not elevate. There is no doubt that this abuse of
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 125
sentiment in their religion, not unlike, to use a simile, the over-
dose of romanticism in literature which tends inevitably towards
general decadence, has affected the moral and intellectual standpoint
of all these people, just as in El Islam the ignorant interpretation of
the Koran, which the Arab's limited reasoning power has crystallised
into falsity, has affected the mental attitude of Northern Africa.
In this we trace the real weakness of Islam — it is practised
by races intellectually inferior to those who follow the dictates of
Christ. It may be pointed out that this implies a corresponding
inferiority in the creed of the saving faith itself ; but it has been
suggested by more than one authority that none of the three
great religions of the world are, in a wide sense, inferior to each
other.' " New truths, old truths, sirs, there is nothing new
possible to be revealed to us in the moral world ; we know all
that we shall ever know, and it is for simply reminding us, by
their various respective expedients, how we do know this and that
other matter, that men get called prophets, poets and the like." ^
The contradictions offered in the pages of the Koran are as
open to generous interpretation as are those of the Bible, and side
by side with violent words and bloody appeals to force, are found
precepts of charity and even justice, while the dogma is simplicity
itself. The secret, therefore, of religious degradation probably
lies less in the creed than in the limited mentality of those who
follow it, and it would be extreme to sympathise with the opinion
of the blind and embittered precursor of Omar Khayyam ^ that
the inhabitants of the earth divide themselves into two categories
— those gifted with intelligence and without religion, and those
with religion but deprived of intelligence. There is very little
doubt that the low moral status of the Mohamedans of Africa,
and, in another degree, of the Andalusians of Spain, springs not
only from a fanatical form of faith, but from mental limitations
^ Compare in this connection an Imperial letter published in Germany in 1903.
^ R. Browning. 3 Abou'I-'Ala 'Al-Ma 'arri.
126 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
as well. Still, to-day, in these very corners of two continents
where the spirit of menace was once so fierce, we may still ask
ourselves which is the strongest of these two of three tremendous
forces in the world's history ; which has spread its wings the
further and least felt the geographical limits of religion ; which is
best able to hold its own ; one as the religion of the intellectual
West, backed up by civilisation, with a hundred dogmas and sects,
the other what it was thirteen centuries ago, perfectly united, since
its four cults are all orthodox, unprogressive, unchanged and
sublimely unreasoning. Both are spreading in numbers, one
through conversion, the other through steady increase of popula-
tion, which in many parts of the Mohamedan world is consider-
able. The total number of Mohamedans to-day is estimated at two
hundred and sixty millions — probably many more, since statistics
outside the Russian Empire, India, Algeria or Tunis, are vague.
China is said to number thirty-three millions of Mohamedans, the
cause of endless internal civil warfare. I n the Malay peninsula. El
Islam is solidly rooting itself and undermining the native paganism
without difficulty. It is, then, without an effort, on the increase ;
without an effort (save in certain areas of the Asiatic world), to run
with the times, with the " change, the one thing changeless " of
men's minds. Does this indicate that Islam appeals very especially
to minds unwilling to problematise, types of mind that must have
their legitimate scope in the world's completeness, their own typical
religious expression, no less than desert wastes and fertile fields share
the earth's surface, the one unalterable, the other admirably adaptive ?
Change and sameness seem to be the two great elements in
the struggle of the world's mentality, and the disciples of each are
still unequally pitted, the great East frowning languidly at the
young world's strides. For the strength of the East is apathy,
and apathy is a crime in the eyes of progress. There seems no
place in so small a sphere for its inert body, the body of a giant,
like to that of the blind Cyclops. But want of space will hardly
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 127
see the vanishing of Mohamedanism, nor will the old prophecy
that for long has existed in northern Africa, that the Christian
faith will return and reassert its power successfully in every spot
from which it was once exiled, hasten its end. Far from that,
Monotheism in a modernised garb, shorn of the heritage of
primitive customs which we would deny to the followers of
Mohamed because our world has never needed them, will once
more sharpen its sword for the old struggle with its great
antagonist, a struggle which, perhaps, will never wear itself out
save by respites, since the conversion of Mohamedans to
Christianity, or vice versa, is a colourless chimera. In the case
of the community of Mohamedans in England, whose leader
staggers under the weight of Oriental honours, and some, at
least, of whose members have had reason to find out too late that
the collision it leads to with the Moorish character is not quite
satisfactory to the European standards of civilisation, we see only
an eccentric growth natural to an age when sects rise and dis-
appear, their restless lights extinguished without leaving any
impression on the mental workings of the religious world.
Evangelising, as we understand it, plays no part in Islam.
We read — those at least who can — upon the walls of the
Alhambra, "Truth lives, lies die away, and it is in the decrees
of Allah to interrogate no one." The Christian converted by
proselytism is no more Mohamedan than the Arab occupation of
foreign countries in the past could be considered as a religious
victory morally. It was a religious victory by force, and it is in
this light that it stands unique in history. From the death of
Mohamed proselytising played no part. The Arab writers who
mention the conquest in the West, rarely express any interest in
religious conversion. In the early days of Islam and the
Moorish conquest only here and there is there any notice of
some act of propaganda in Africa ; but in Spain, none. The
indifference to the part reasoning plays in individual belief, the
128 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
dislike to all questioning, shows a curious affinity to the Egyptian
mind of the past. The Musulman to-day does not even believe
that his religion can be acquired by reasoning, the weight of
which would be a burden the soul could not bear. The well-
known answer of the marabout to the suppliant who sought to
know definitely whether smoking was likely to land him nearer hell
than heaven, is an example of the diplomatic avoidance of a direct
answer, so dear to the Arab mind : "All I can tell you, my friend,"
was the holy man's reply, "is that the fire is not far from your nose."
So again we come to the same question. Whether or not the
so-called religious degradation of the Mohamedans of Africa is
not due to their lack of progressive intelligence rather than to
the limitations of their Koran. We see among the Mohamedans
of other races a wider reading of its confused precepts ; nor must
it be forgotten that the awakening of the Tartars which is said to
be at hand, will be due to no weakening in their faith, but to the
workings of the intellectual life which in many an old race seems
to have fallen into trance not death. If Islam has fallen as low
as it well can among the sects of Persia, there rose, three
hundred years ago, from the midst of the Musulmans of western
India (now as many as fifty-seven millions in number), the proud
effort of the Emperor Akbar to found a universal religion based
on free philosophical principles. But the religion of Allah, as it
was called, is not for our world ; nevertheless, a proof that what
the good men do is not always interred with their bones, the
effort left a distinct endeavour to harmonise Islam with the
exigencies of European civilisation without losing anything of
its religious fervour. No religion, mono- or pantheistic, is irre-
concilable with progress. The great prophets of the past have
always been infinitely wiser than those they sought to convert.
An intellectual race can well afford to hold to any belief, as the
greatest races have always shown, since however it may retard,
it cannot hold it back. And it is impossible to deny that, in
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 129
spite of the phases of fanaticism and dogmatism through which
Christian religions have had to pass, civilisation has advanced, and
what is more conclusive, science as well.
But whatever flights the soul of Islam has taken in the past
or will take, where do we trace any transitory condition in the
Arab ? Has he changed from what he was thirteen centuries
ago ? If, as is the historian's verdict, his religion hopelessly
cripples him, what of the free-thinking Arabs who have always
counted a goodly percentage from Morocco to Tunis ? The
Separatists, or Free Thinkers of Islam, as they are called, who
endeavoured in close study of Greek philosophy to find a solution
to all dogmatic problems, and who treated the Koran and its
traditions in a wider sense, never succeeded in displaying any
genuine theological reasoning. Devout or otherwise, careless in
the practice of their faith or reciting the Koran from end to end,
the Arab off^ers ever the same barrier to all enlightenment or
advance. The colonisers of Mohamedan Africa are not to be
entirely envied. They have to meet a force which no wisdom
can penetrate — the force of mental limitation. Curiously enough,
this limitation has dawned but slowly upon the colonising mind
in Algeria and Morocco. As long as the Arab was a warlike
power, backed by the halo of a dashing courage, the freedom of his
nomad life and the chimera of possible conversion, he was poetised
by a romantic school of Orientalists. His very faith seen from
afar had something of the rude poetry of the desert and of a
splendid past. He was not an unworthy foe,
" La main ouverte
Le sabre tire.
Et une seule parole."
But to-day the tide has changed in favour of the ruder but
more amalgamatable Berber. The Arab has proved himself by
instinct, tradition and intelligence, as opposed to civilisation.
He is limp, nomad, aristocratic and idle. The Berber, however.
I30 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
is more energetic and impressionable to new influences, more
indifferent to religion, or rather his religious belief is open to
the term of schism which in this case presents an apparent
advantage. To explain these divergencies among the followers
of the Prophet, the Arabs employ a simple simile. The four
orthodox rites are compared to four travellers drinking from the
same fountain but from different vessels. A fifth drinks also,
but only after agitating the water which he swallows clouded.
This is the case with the Berbers, who whether in religion or
otherwise, have always asserted their independence, and kept up
the same standard of a rude but proud people. But the Arab
has retrograded persistently since the fall of the Moorish Empire,
not because of his religion but because of his mental poverty.
Islam is as the fountain head of Moorish history in Spain,
just as it is the turbid pool from which everything starts in
northern Africa. But was not the water of that fountain clear
when first it bubbled up through the arid life of Arabia, through
the profound indifference to religious unity of its gay and
thoughtless tribes? The religious feeling in the nomad was
curiously undeveloped. Far from being naturally devout ^ his
desert home resisted religion with energy. Indeed, in spite of
his natural ardour of temperament, religious belief which so
appeals to the imagination meant singularly little to this unim-
aginative people. Their idolatry would seem to have been a
parasitic growth gathered perhaps in remote times from Egypt,
and little adapted to their race. They had their gods but no
mythology. Those gods had no past, no history, nor did any-
one seek to compose one. This makes one realise how much
hold the old mythology must have had on the Greek mind, not
because of the belief in the gods themselves, but because of the
poetry of imagination which so enveloped them. But the Arabs
had only idols easily shattered ; nothing about them that could
^ Dozy.
,■& '^m^M^'
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 131
live on as fairy stories remain in some corner of the mind from
childhood. Lack of invention is the keynote to the character of
all children of the desert, and Mohamed, himself uninventive
though so marvellously enlightened, could only offer them a
simple monotheism built up upon borrowed institutions of
Judaism and the old pagan cult, and professing nothing more
than the purifying of existing religions which the corruption of
their followers had debased beyond recognition.
Imbued with all the sternness of mediaeval Christianity he
depicted not only the Muslim's Paradise but the horrors of hell
and the approaching judgment. Preaching in rhythmic prose
after the manner of his country and which shows how old was
the veneration given to poetry by the Arabs, he was looked upon
as a deluded poet who indulged in fables. But as time went on
no wonder that the Meccans began to look upon the despised
prophet in their midst more seriously. Who was this man,
noble but obscure, calling himself Prophet and preaching
miracles, preaching, too, a vast unity among tribes who had
always shown themselves singularly opposed to all cohesion ?
The danger surrounding an Arab who dared to separate himself
from the ideas and customs of his tribe showed a determined
courage in facing tribal complications, a danger which finesse
alone could not have protected him against, and which was prob-
ably only kept in check by adherents making common cause
with him until it became difficult to accuse any one apart.
From where did his courage and immovable conviction arise ?
It has always been difficult to precise Mohamed's character. He
came from a race which offers little contradiction to a single
type. The Arab of that day was essentially the same as the
Arab of a long yesterday and as of to-morrow. Yet from the
first Mohamed presented a strange contrast to the robust
natives of Arabia. Impressionable and nervous in constitution,
tormented by religious doubts, he exhibits an almost total trans-
132 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
formation from the old type. He may not have been superior
to others of his race, but he certainly did not resemble them.
Whether under the influence of stronger minds or only swayed
by his own questionings, how or when he first felt the dictates of
a divine message, only legend can tell us. But a man of forty is
more likely to listen to his own reasonings than to another's, and
Mohamed had passed that age — a ripe one for the desert — when his
vocation, definitely revealed to him, allowed him to enter on the
prophetic stage of his career, a life of stern and despondent hardship.
Nothing in history, it has been pointed out, is more remark-
able than the condition of crowds of human beings influenced and
swayed by a veritable religious epidemic, a contagious mysticism
resulting in the conversion of masses of individuals such as may be
seen among the Christians of the Middle Ages, or in the history of
El Islam. But Mohamed did not live to see the miracle of the full
tide's turn. Long after his death the new faith was only kept in
existence through the bloody quarrels of the old and new noblesse
of Arabia, the aristocratic paganism as against the lately created
aristocracy of the Defenders of the Faith. Difiicult as it often is
to find a junction for human sympathies with the Arab, past and
present, we are at least on familiar ground when it comes to the
question of pride of birth, and we see across the centuries how
powerful a part social traditions played amongst the most
primitive of people, penetrating into their religious belief no
less than into their social customs. But we see that the Prophet,
in spite of his remarkable insight into the character of his race,
never fully realised the part heredity was to play among his
people. He had vacillated over the unwritten laws of precedence
which the Bedouin, rude as he was, clung to ; unwilling to
recognise the superficially converted pagan noblesse of his
country, in the place of his devoted adherents, he met the
difliculty by preaching for a while a fine doctrine of equality, the
last in the world this people of proud tradition could understand.
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 133
But little by little those who had shared his early hardships were
allotted all the posts of honour, his principle of equality under-
mined itself, and Islam was dragged through seas of jealous blood
which flowed even to the shores of Spain.
Those red seas have wiped out that early struggle. All this
is now of the past, and Mohamed's newly-founded noblesse has
won the battle in the long run. The aristocracy of the de-
scendants of the Prophet is now sanctified by religion, and no
one would dream of disputing it. "The head is the head, the
tail is the tail," is an Arab maxim.
: But older still than the traditions of nobility, history tells us
of another internal struggle of that strange desert country which
no religion in the world could calm ; a terrible dormant feud to
which Mohamed, by his agitating of tribal problems, was
destined to give new vigour and bitterness. Two factions, each
representing a vast number of tribes had, far back into antiquity,
exhibited a refinement of hatred towards each other such as has
never been surpassed in history. The origin of the feud is lost
in the ages. In other countries a quarrel has a motive ; in
Arabia none. " The original hostility," says an old poet, "came
from our ancestors, and as long as there are descendants it will
last. Neither knew why he hated the other with such racial
hatred. Both races had the same Semitic origin, both shared
the same country, the same language, in time to come the same
religion. Yet still the old hatred exists, and to-day the de-
scendants of the two antagonistic parties about Jerusalem are
sworn foes of each other, yet know not why. Because a melon was
picked by one in the garden of the other, because by accident
a leaf from the vineyard of one was plucked by his foe, the war
of years followed. Three or four hundred years later the feud
was revived in Europe, and on the borders of the Guadalquivir
the same mortal struggle was renewed, Arab sapping the strength
of Arab, revenging himself for an unknown injury which seas of
134 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
blood had already wiped away. And to this strange people,
balanced between unquenchable jealousies and fiery pride,
Mohamed, among them and yet wholly apart, preached his
doctrine of reform, his fountain for the desert.
The character of Mohamed united two elements usually ad-
mitted to be antagonistic ; a passionate enthusiasm of youth with
the cold calculation of age. His youth belongs to mysticism, his
manhood to military leadership, his last years to both. During
his farewell pilgrimage to Mecca, in his preaching of that time,
old as he was, may be traced the enthusiasm of his early youth
rather than any new and matured policy for the future. We see
once more the visionary speaking to a people who never under-
stood his words until he preached with his sword unsheathed.
He was a dreamer, but the most politic of men. Napoleon
himself was not more ambitious or diplomatic. In the face of
ceaseless danger, and often the apparent hopelessness of his cause,
his courage never failed him. Did it arise from absolute con-
viction in his divine message.'' Voltaire considered him an
impostor of genius, while to others he is impostor because
there is an apparent lack of unity between his early strictness of
life with the conduct of his later days. But a prophet is not a
god, and if for over twenty-three years he ever seemed to those
around him, in the most humble surroundings of life, still a
prophet, that is much to be said of weak mortal. To some he
is the victim of epilepsy, because he suffered from visions or
hallucinations, but epileptics are said to lose the impressions and
memory of their visions, and Mohamed remembered his with
startling clearness. He has been called a sufferer from hysteria,
but were this so, he must have been physically a suffering and
often incapable creature, morally as well as physically. In his
life, on the contrary, we trace only a robust determination which
always got the better of a nervous organisation. From beginning
to end, with one exception, it was perfectly consistent, diplomatic,
Gate in the Old Town Wali, Tangier.
IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM 135
and alert, and the absence of logical reasoning in the Koran
would not point to any mental inferiority, given the race from
which he sprang. Perhaps the least of his several claims to the
role of a genuine prophet, inspired by an ardent and visionary
mind, may be recognised in the extreme persecution which
pursued him for the first ten years of his life, the true heritage of
the true prophet, borne with a fortitude only reasonable, given
his faith. If he was but the natural outcome of the circumstances
and unrest surrounding him, he is no less a natural phenomena
unequalled in history. The great wave of religious enthusiasm
which was surely sweeping over the whole of Europe, caught him
on its crest instead of engulfing him. His religion swept away
gods and idols, and spread with tremendous force over Egypt
and Africa, Spain and Sicily, the deserts of the Atlas, the
banks of the Ganges. It laid the foundation of a civilisation
whose corner-stones were Empire-building, unity, order, and
religious fraternity. No ordinary Arab was this, a great
Napoleon among prophets, founder of Empire, would-be de-
stroyer of old traditions, maker of laws, who passed away while
his throne was still tottering.
But those laws, though defective and in no way essential to
the saving faith, live on. Without comparing the imperfect
germ of Mohamed's code with the Code Napoleon, yet might not
some parallel be drawn to the posthumous influence of Napoleon's
own law-making work upon the history of France .? Students
of contemporaneous history are frequently led to the conclusion
that radical changes in the government of France are impossible,
so completely has his great work crystallised the constitutional
development of the people. It remains and will always remain the
same, no matter what outward forms may change. For this reason
the colonisation by France of Mohamedan countries offers a dis-
couraging barrier, an officialdom which robs the colonising
government of all freedom, insight and scope. So, through no
136 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
intention of his own, Mohamed's words, inscribed without any
revision, crystallised the laws of his religion and reduced his
descendants to accept from the infidel an analogy to the old
choice which was offered to conquered countries : the choice of
the Koran or the sword.
Why did one so astute and so eager for codified reform,
leave the Koran in a condition of possible misinterpretation.
Why did Mohamed neglect this part of his heritage to his new
kingdom, and preserve with so little care words into which he
had nevertheless breathed a fiery eloquence ? We know that the
palm-leaf substitutes for paper, jotted over with impassioned
notes, passed in a still embryo condition to the Khalif Usman,
who patched them together with the ambiguity dear to the Arab
mind, sealing the mass of half-intelligible matter with his un-
willing life-blood. Then came another, more scholarly and
therefore still more ambiguous, who gave the finishing touches,
until it has come down to us, a masterpiece of crude iterations,
of endless repetition, unintelligible to the average Mohamedan,
who learns it by heart without the least desire — after the eager
questioning of boyhood has been quashed — to grapple with its
entanglements. Yet who can turn over the pages of this Book
of the Desert without a strong sentiment of wonder and admira-
tion for its enduring power ? It was not written for us, and
translated or not, its whole language never can reach us. He
who wrote those fragments never dreamed, perhaps, of how
enduring its pages were to be among his followers, relying for
his success upon far higher claims than any book.^ But there it
stands, a monument that fills us with despair, not because it
represents fairly either El Islam or its antagonism towards the
thought of our times, but because in its pages is locked away the
intelligence of the Arab mind.
^ El Islam. Burton.
A Marabout near Tangier.
CHAPTER IX
iEMorocco
" The Power of Destiny rocks one to dreams, while another it awakens from
profound slumber." Aboffl-Ala ' Al-Ma ^arru
**I LOVE all that I have never seen," once said a child eager to
travel. Men, too, sometimes feel the same odd sentiment, a
peculiar attraction towards what may elude them or may still be
too strange to decipher. Such is Morocco still to many, but the
traveller, the explorer who cuts the first steps in a rock, or the
historian who gives the practical summary of his uphill work, is
at a disadvantage here, in Morocco, nature and native character
alike are as wind-swept sands that keep no trace of or for European
feet, no treaties with history, no tangible touch with Europe past
or present. Men learn the language till they talk it as natives
themselves, penetrate a dangerous country clothed in rags, endure
fevers, are kidnapped (though, in truth, this is no longer looked
upon as a misfortune), feel profound sympathy with the Berbers
and their ways of life, write books, theorise passionately, know-
ing, as it were, things too well to judge dispassionately any longer,
and yet arrive at no goal, till in time the very vagueness of the
profit of devotion to a strange soil affects the men themselves.
Morocco seems always to consume away the labour expended
upon it, rendering it as ungrateful as the weather-chart entries of
a diary, the traveller's unfortunate prerogative, as the following
lines from an artisticjourney through Morocco help to illustrate : —
January 8. A white frost covers the stiffened vegetation.
,, 13. The rain has ceased. . . . We start in cloudy and
damp weather.
„ 14. The morning is bright with sunshine, a fresh breeze,
and the weather continues fine,
s 137
138 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
January 18. The night was cold.
,, 19. The morning is fresh, the air keen.
,, 22. Abominably cold this morning, and the snow falling.
A land of contrast is Morocco ! Even in its weather To-day
and To-morrow are as wide apart in their essence as desert and
oasis. It was but some few months ago that these peaceful words
were written : —
" La situation se trouve ainsi fixee au point de vue diplomatique
et notre influence peut s'exercer sur les territoires qui nous sont
acquis, sans avoir a craindre de la part de quelque autre puis-
sance europ6enne, ou des pretentions qui puissent se legitimer." '
Yet half a century earlier, the French flag in the vicinity of
Tangiers roused other feelings and ** quand les Anglais virent une
arm^e frangaise sous les ordres du gouverneur-general d'Algerie
entrer dans le Maroc, et une escadre frangaise commandee par
un fils du roi paraitre devant Tanger, I'inquidtude fut grande,
et Sir Robert Peel, toujours tres attentif aux impressions pub-
liques, sen pr^occupa vivement." Events move quickly now in
Morocco, and though the French no longer echo the words of
the writer Blanc that there is a nation too many in the world,
and that either France must perish or England be erased from
the map, she might, by substituting the name of another nation
for that of England, find the phrase no less useful in her summing-
up of her position in Morocco to-day. There is always a senti-
ment of the morrow and the new life it may bring in the atmo-
sphere of this country, always the feeling of a land far too beautiful
for the footprints of the tramping world to stride across. Could
even a Napoleon — preaching Islam with new zest and turning his
back on the Pope (rejoicing, too, that the France of to-day has by
no means forgotten that attitude of the First Empire) — settle the
entrancing Moroccan question without the feathers of the
' La France en Afrique. Par Edmond Ferry.
Entkanck to the Sultan's Palace, Tangier.
MOROCCO
139
peacock's tail sweeping him angrily into the sea ? Who can tell
but some of the Napoleonic characteristics might not have been out
of place at a certain moment ; might have shone, perhaps, uncom-
monly brightly in interrogating the
Sphinx of Islam, which hides as far
as it can from the coast capital of
Tangiers, from that half European,
half Jewish town of seemingly so
little political importance, known
to the whole world through a grace-
ful literature of many tongues.
Of little political importance is
Tangiers superficially, but what a
breakwater. Heof thethreetongues
— one that says Yes, one that says
No, and one that says neither Yes nor
No — must be well aware of the fact
to-day. Every invader and would-
be coloniser has broken his bark
against its angry and beautiful shores.
Morocco, able to hold herself inde-
pendent of her eight ports, has more '
or less sacrificed Tangiers to Europe.
Occupied successively by nation
after nation, by Roman, Goth and
Arab, by Portuguese and English and Spanish, bombarded by the
French, badly protected, inhabited by a lazy conglomeration of
Moors, Jews and Nigros, all vampiring each other with inhuman in-
difference, both Tangiers and Ceuta have proved empty conquests.
All the reinforcements and provisioning by sea, the easy retreat by
the opposite coasts, have never simplified progress into the interior.
Ceuta and Tangiers have been as twin rocks on which the Mediter-
ranean of history has launched tragedy after tragedy of ambitious
A Native of Tangiers.
HO IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
shipwreck ; and Portugal — what memories are hers to haunt this
coast. Here came the young Dom Sebastian with the words of
Camoens filling his youthful heart with unweighed ambition, —
** Thou shalt leave thy boyhood behind thee, and armed in manli-
ness, take the reins of State in thy grasp, and carry thine arms across
Africa and the East, which tremble. Already the Moors pale in
divining thy prophecy of their ruin . . ." Here he vanished away,
and was mourned not as for the dead, but as for one who was young
and strong and must return. Here, over a century earlier, another
young and ardent prince gave himself as hostage, and was never seen
again. Here came Camoens, the unfortunate, hoping to heal the
wound on which, perhaps, the riband of Catherine still lay hidden,
" Keep my riband, take and keep it,
(I have loosed it from my hair),"
came and fought and won nothing. But in the pages of the
great Portuguese epic, inspired with the extraordinary patriotism
of his native land, is found, as nowhere else, the crusading spirit
of this age which for long haunted the coast of Morocco, unable
to penetrate into its midst.
Tangiers never changes. In the descriptions of travels of a
hundred years ago and more, we seem still to recognise the very
sentiment with which it is still approached, the warm charm and
divertissement it has exercised on so many types of mind.
The curious medley of human beings has always arrested the
same attention ; the bigoted Moors with their sun-hardened
skulls, the degraded Jews whose lot here, however, is more
assured than in the interior ; the little Jewish girls with henna-
tinted feet and hands, in sign of their precocious marriages ; the
beautiful Jewish women who, as M, Didier has pointed out as an
inexplicable phenomena, have never fallen as low in their physical
type as the men ; the fine indifferent Berbers ; and not least the
lovely Moorish children who possess the grace which can make
all children classic in the old sense of the word, while here some-
The: Gkkat Mosouk, Tangier.
MOROCCO
141
thing else is theirs as well — a quite nameless charm worthy of a
sweeter setting, for the roads they play in — "quellesrues in-
fectes ! " But this is the side of the life of Tangiers on which
none can dwell without repetition. Though less artistic, it might
be juster to consider this spot as a kind of
pugilistic theatre, where no quarrels have ever
been solved. And in this theatre of unholy
warfare the consuls of the world sit and wait,
for there is nothing else to do — the real drama
goes on across the hills and far away.
It is a very exquisite theatre. There is
more poetry in the sea breezes that penetrate to
the hearts of its gardens ; that sweep clean and /
cool over the wave-filmed sands, than about any
other coast of Islam. It is the very land of
Arab poetry and song. Everything luxuriously
lovely in nature, flagrantly joyful, fiercely warm,
belongs to its breath of life. If the Moors
braved many a barren site for the setting of
their jewels of art in Spain, they could find
nothing here but a naturally fair frame of gold
and azure, a very home for palaces and fairy
interiors. To-day Morocco is the only living
though blurred reflection of that art in which
Spain once gloried, an art which, from its wayward imitation
of itself, happily never expressed the tangible decadence afl^ect-
ing the life of the country itself. But the very word
decadence must be used with reserve in discussing the Moors
of Andalusia or of Fez. There is not a trace of it to-day
in their fanaticism and healthy Oriental inertia. Quite inde-
scribably proud and sanctified by traditional independence are
country and people alike, a monarchical monument of the Oriental
interpretation of the " simple life " which it seems a pity to have
A Citizen of Tangiers.
142
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to dissolve. Tolstoi — to quote from one who has already quoted
his words ' — is, as it were, exalted with indignation against our
modern civilisation which poisons the free breath of life ; crushing
thousands of beings into towns, factories and miserable dwellings,
where the greater part of the ills of mankind are gendered, and
making through the technical progress of
experimental science less for human happi-
ness than for its misfortune. To him new
discoveries are only medicines for their
own diseases, progress only diminishes
the natural blessings already possessed by
humanity. Is it to be so with every race
under the sun, and is progress insidiously
necessary to races that have existed so long
and so bravely without its ill ? Will the
smoke of factories blacken the sands of
Africa, and the natives of Morocco be
drawn irresistibly towards town existence
as they show themselves to be in Algeria,
clustering together in the whirlpool of
busy prisons, dropping their free lithe
skins and turning into flabby Moors, the
only metamorphosis which Arab and Berber
knows of by which to interpret the bodily decadence following
in the footsteps of our moral civilisation ? But the Oriental
question posed to the world — a world which to-day seems all
too small for its answer — has not yet reached its philan-
thropical development, and discussions on the simple life must
still be reserved for those to whom the calm of Islam is unknown.
Knowledge of the Oriental character ! How often do we
hear the need of this in political affairs, yet never enough.
He who has it, will he ever be given free hand by his Govern-
^ Edmond Ferry.
A Woman of Tangiers.
A Street in Tangier.
MOROCCO 143
ment, which certainly never seems to possess that valuable
equipment itself. The desire to spring a military " coup de
main " on the country, which an able French diplomat was so
eager to carry out, the march of a flying column to Fez, might
it not have settled the whole question in short order, since in
the battle of words the Oriental must always worst us ? Any
military force which the Moors could assemble at the present
moment could offer no serious resistance to an European force
provided with artillery. Had the French minister at Fez been
authorised to adopt a sharp and decisive policy in pushing his
demands, would things have been worse than now . . . since
still Morocco is the centre of possibilities and to-morrow and
Fez still hold their problems unsolved ?
Fez ! When will the railway reach those mud walls, that wide
bay of houses and minarets sweeping the hills apart ? Is it beauti-
ful, or strangely disappointing as some find it ? Let each traveller
decide. I only know that the link between Granada and Fez, be-
tween the playful and tortuous gardens of the Andalusian alcazars
and the orange and citron groves which form retreats from the
narrow streets of Fez, is still strong, though all the intellectual gild-
ing has gone. To-day there is a shadow over it, as though it were
doomed, this Mecca of the Magreb, where the learned preached and
still preach war against the infidels ; where all the mystic arts of
alchemy, astronomy and divination once flourished and the women
of to-day still search the flames for secrets of their monotonous
future, and to which the Moors return as they leave it, having
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. It is curious to think
that so close an alliance as of marriage might once have allied
Fez to France in the past — in the days of Louis XIV., when
the Sultan honoured that monarch by requesting the hand of
his illegitimate daughter, Mdlle. de la Valli^re. Such honour
will never be offered again.
Yes, by every Moorish tradition Fez with its golden name,
144 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
its river-traversed palace, its fountains and Andalusian mills
which know no rival in Morocco, it is said, save at Sefrou,
has rare claim to beauty. No matter that sordid streets and
ugly corners are as familiar a feature here as elsewhere in
Morocco. It is the life of the Moors of Fez, in which
some dim atavism of memory still belongs to Spain and
the days of the Alhambra, which pervades this town. When
the Andalusian Moors, passing miraculously all the block-
ades of the African frontiers, poured with a very whirlwind of
fanaticism into Morocco, their revived fervour for this sacred
city of the descendants of their Prophet gave them a new
impetus to build, and create and perpetuate all they had lost.
This wonderful city which had once risen tremblingly, at war
with itself as with the world, grew more beautiful with richer
palaces and fairer mosques, astonishing all with its fable. Those
princes who saw that Spain was lost to Islam, endeavoured to
give the same brilliancy to their civilisation in Africa, but they
never succeeded completely. The numberless mosques and
schools they founded drew to Fez and elsewhere a crowd of
African students who contributed more, perhaps, by their
numbers than their learning, to the renown of their university ;
but the teaching of Islam had turned in an inverse sense to the
evolution of European thought ; ' it became involved in the
mystic and unscientific learning of the Middle Ages which had
now passed away, nor has the life and mind of Islam in Morocco
changed since then. A scholastic narrowness from which no
great savant could extricate himself characterised its Moorish
culture. Life and thought contracted together into a hopeless
intolerance, and Moorish intellectuality, which had for so long lit
up the intense gloom of mediaeval mysticism, shrivelled away for
ever. To-day the University of El-garouiyin, with its carelessly-
kept library, is frequented only by poor students and strangers
^ Une Ville de P Islam Fh. Henri Gaillard.
The Minaret of the Great Mosque ok Tangier.
1
MOROCCO
145
to the town who seek there food and lodging. As for the
Moorish women of to-day, they are little cultured. A large
number know not how to read or write. Some, through ignor-
ance, abstain from even saying their prayers. Yet in this city,
so distinctly of the Arab past, there is a faint aroma of the old
status of women, of little private schools for girls, of broidery
classes ; not the beginning of progress, only its tag end. The
harem life is rarer, polygamy tends towards
disappearance, there is in fact a higher form
of family social life than elsewhere, the result
of economy, however, rather than morality.
This family existence may also be the result of
the peculiar feeling of citizenship which Fez
exercises over its inhabitants, and which for
many generations has held the same groups to-
gether, marrying and intermarrying. It would
seem to be a direct influence of the Moors of
Andalusia, the descendants of whom are still
proud of their origin, and the Sultan himself
counts two among his ministers whose ancestors
migrated from Granada. But the calm proud
existence of Fez which has passed with a refined monotony for so
long amidst its houses and gardens, and where from the cradle to
the grave the days pass gently, sad or gay as the divine will
ordains,' is gradually losing its mystery. After hiding mystically
for centuries, its veil has been wrenched aside till, more legendic
in its beauty, alas ! than ever, snapshot and pencil and diplomatic
incursion have played alike on squalor and departed glory.
The Moors chased from Spain were the most terrible ex-
pounders of Islam, as they are to-day. They seem to preserve a
lasting and bitter rancour against all the races of Europe, a
rancour for the curse of decadence which their enforced emigra-
' Le Maroc d'aujour d'hui. Eugene Aubin,
T
Moorish Ladv
146 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
tion brought in its wake. No new conquests, no fresh glory, no
real pulse of civilisation, save in its decline, was left them. The
Moorish legend in Spain remained as their old impetus to
patriotism, to art and literature, for all time, but they themselves
were lost in the gulf of their own race and its inherent tyranny.
In Spain, Velasquez was to paint their flight. Lope de Vega had
sung of it, great bards had unsheathed their swords against them.
Their very echo in Andalusia was as a breeze over plains, echoing
for ever the influence of the East over the West. But what
influence had the West exercised over the Moors which was to
defy time and change } The Spaniards have never profoundly
influenced any other race in the world, save in details. Certainly
not the Moors. What impression have the Spaniards left in
Morocco to compare to that of the Moors in Spain ? Spanish
Christians from the fourteenth century were accorded protection
throughout the Berber empire, and a Christian colony of Cata-
lonians and Aragonese established themselves at Tlemcen, yet
Tlemcen was never other than a centre of Islamic culture. If it
is impossible to deny that the influence of the Middle Ages — an
entirely western influence in its intellectual sense — afi^ected the
Moors of Andalusia in many ways, it was but skin deep. Only
for a while had the chivalry of Moor and Christian confounded
themselves in a common ideal ; only for a while could the
summing up of the mediaeval spirit, as Ruskin has perfecdy
conceived it, include Saracen and European alike :
" First, a king who was the best knight in his kingdom, and
on whose swordstrokes hung the fate of his kingdom.
" Secondly, a monk who has been trained from youth in
greater hardships than any soldier, and had learnt to desire no
other life than one of hardship.
" And lastly, a craftsman absolutely master of his craft, and
taking such pride in the exercise of it as all healthy souls take in
putting forth their personal powers.
MOROCCO 147
" These three kind of persons, I repeat, we have to conceive
before we can understand any single event of the Middle Ages.
For all that was enduring in them was done by men such as
these."
All these qualities the Moors could count their own in Spain,
and all they lost in Africa, and if any doubt is entertained as to
the depth of Moorish culture in Andalusia, the story of their
rapid decline in Morocco confirms it. So completely artificial
was that exquisite civilisation of Granada, that after centuries of
western influence it had failed to tone down a single violent
passion of their race. From the end of the Middle Ages, the
Musulman evolution ceased almost as suddenly as it had begun.
Its reason for existing seemed gone, it had found its status
politically and socially, its patriarchal administration, its cohesion.
The Koran was an open book, all its secrets had been interpreted,
and for a while, a brief but glorious period, what remained of
the Mohamedan empire stood still, as though awaiting a fresh
impulse. That impulse came as a protest from Europe, so
violent that it drove all the vivid but unlasting life of Islam
from the peninsula, back to the burning shores of Africa.
Here, had Berber and Arab sought cohesion, they could have
revenged themselves easily on the Christian armies in their wake.
But the energy of the past had gone, and none to-day can tell
why.
A large number of exiles, many of whom had shone in the
brilliant court of Granada, found their way instinctively to the
sacred spot where an intellectual centre had long existed. Never
was capital so well situated in regard to its own safety rather
than to the safety of the country, so luxuriously enveloped in its
own privacy, broken only by the sounds of running water dear
to Arab and Moor alike ; nor so sheltered from all the move-
ment of commercial activity or strategical importance which
would have characterised such sites as Rabat or Sale. Morocco,
148
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
wonderful country that it is, can afford to dispense with com-
merce, and this fact and the story of its freedom from commercial
activity before the eighteenth century, has no doubt had much
to do with its obstinate independence in the face of other powers.
Morocco must give up her riches. Perhaps the West will appreci-
ate them more than Morocco can herself. In these days merely
ancestral right to possess any portion of the globe is a title no
longer admitted. But only by the most primitive weapons do
the Moors combat this truth. That is the difficulty, for our
own weapons are over complicated for diplomatic fencing with
a people at once so primitive, yet so sophisticated.
Snake Charmers in Morocco.
o^
CHAPTER X
zAlgeria
" Nous ne revons pas d'un Eldorado. Nous ne sommes pas les eternels
emigrants qui dessinent au bord de la mer mysterieuse et sur le sable d'un
rivage d(fteste les epures d'un vaisseau de fuite. Nous sommes des
traditionalistes." Les Am'tt'ih Franca'tses. Barres.
" Pays de la Lune," the French call it, for every undulation of
mountain, plain and valley, of desert or oasis, are found in it ;
the extremes of fertility and barren waste, of cold and intense
heat, of town or Homeric life. One might almost add that the
extremes of suggestive beauty or disappointing landscape are here
as well. The south is as beautiful, the mountainous dis-
tricts are as varied and grand as Algiers itself is unsatisfying and
barren of the poetry of sentiment. However fair the day, the
stretches of deep, green hillside clothed with the forestry which
marks the coloniser's hand ; the distant sea so dark against the
white buildings, remain curiously unresponsive. Gardens of
luxuriant verdure smile above the busy town, but no Muse has
ever cast her shadow beneath the leafage. There are Moorish
gardens about the slopes where a breath other than of sun-warmed
flowers and perfumed air is sought in vain, for echo and zephyr
alike have passed them over. Algiers is no city of poetic past or
present, and it might safely be affirmed that its future belongs
still more to the sphere of the useful than to the ideal. There
is, too, about the atmosphere of Algiers itself that most un-
pardonable of characteristics — provincialism — a provincialism
profoundly uninspired, incapable of producing the very ghost of
any such psychological study as of a Madame Bo vary.
149
ISO IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
It would seem as though countries and not people were
responsible for the poetic vein, and though the wonderful desert
still awaits its great hymn, there is little doubt but that it will
find voice some day ; but who could sing a hymn to the gods
within radius of this cosmopolitan and unbeautiful town, from
which even the Arab's rhythmic droning has died away ? Even the
artistic life of Algiers, which since Fromentin's day has been
unwillingly advancing towards a national Villa Medici in its midst,
is more forced than natural, and men like Rochegrosse or Dinet
are more influenced by vanishing types than by the landscape.
Orientalism, which to the European is so full of inspiration, is
not found in this country as it is in Morocco, or Tunis or Egypt,
save in restricted areas. The landscape of Algeria is cosmo-
politan, and Spaniard or Italian, Frenchman or even Swiss, all find
in it an echo of their own lands, as the very natives themselves
echo every race. This does not make Algeria less wonderful and
rich in natural contrasts, but it does make it too complicated for
perfect expression, and poet and artist alike are rather confused
by vivid impressions than inspired by any individual loveliness.
In Algiers the Oriental character has almost completely dis-
appeared. Great boulevards, many-storied houses, handsome
shop-windows, squares in the French style, all is '* de notre pays,"
rather than subservient to the natural instinct of the spot. The
characteristic French cafe life, too, flourishes here, all the more
naturally perhaps, since from this coast came, very probably, the
fashion of sipping cofi^ee in regular coff'ee houses ; a fashion
which early in the eighteenth century had reached such a pitch in
Paris that as many as a dozen cafes might be counted in a single
street, perfuming the air with the aromatic sweetness of
"... cette liqueur si chere
Qui manquait a Virgile et qu'adora Voltaire."
The excessive use of it by the Arabs may account for the fact
that they are almost absolutely free from the ills of melancholy,
Fountain in Courtyard ok the Great Mosque, Algiers.
ALGERIA
151
for as far back as the seventeenth century in France was not coffee
esteemed a sovereign preventative against sadness, an excellent
remedy to chase away black melancholy ? But the Oriental
qualities of this cheerful beverage are no longer found there as of
old, and even in Algiers it is hard to find the real thing, though
Saddling the Caid's Horse, Algeria.
the quantity of Turkish coffee-pots for sale shows a certain
interest in encouraging its use.
What a curious crowd of nationalities are seen in this typical
capital of a colony, the only town in Africa where the French are
in the majority and count more than double the percentage of
natives. Up the queer Italian-looking street leading to the
famous Kasbah — which, by the bye, must have fallen not because
of a " coup d'eventail," since the use of the fan is unknown to the
Arabs, but probably with the blow of some fly-whisk of silver
incrusted with coral — are seen swarms of Moors, Nubians, Creoles,
Alsatians, Italians, Spaniards and Jews. The last are, of course,
152 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
accused of being overgiven to commerce, but if there is a spot in
the world where commerce and bartering are as the breath of life
to all classes and races, it is this where the artistic and intellectual
milieux are as tiny oases in the midst of a vast market, and if it
be a crime to collect wealth by means fair or foul, the criminals
are not only found among the Hebrew nationality. Every
language is heard, and it can in truth be said of Algiers as of
Tunis in the days of Salammbo : '* II y avait la des hommes de
toutes les nations." Even the absence of Turks is replaced by
the vanishing half-Turk, half-native hybrid.
But this collection of human opposites does not Impress one
very favourably, and the old Arab maxim which says, " Ask no
questions on a man's character ; watch with whom he walks, for
each man contaminates his neighbour," would be somewhat con-
fusing here. During the early years of the French occupation
the emigrants who poured into Algeria with a feverish greed as
to some Eldorado, were little else than adventurers, shady char-
acters, and even worthless officials, whose interests were entirely
their own, till for a while this great city was looked upon
askance as one of idle pleasure rather than of serious growth.
Colonising has to fight, as best it can, such legacies of human
riffraff, grafted on to the new colony by the too-willing mother
country. But in the case of Algeria, not only the riffraff of
France but that of Spain as well considered the soil as its own,
and though with time the Spaniards earned for themselves a
certain amount of consideration, as forming a useful branch of
the community, in the capital itself they undoubtedly had a
deteriorating effect upon both French and natives. For some
mysterious reason, too, the effect produced by Christian races
upon the native character in Africa seems always unsatisfactory.
Our civilisation has not genuinely bettered the Arab so far, and
in Algeria he has even retrograded morally since the days of the
conquest. The effect of foreign influence upon him in Egypt,
ALGERIA 153
though seemingly a parallel case, is not quite the same. Foreign
colonisation in that monotonous country cannot profoundly
change a people, the peculiar conditions of whose desert home
must always produce the same type of human existence and
native isolation. New influences along the banks of the Nile
have lessened the historic misery of existence without affecting
the mode of life or thought, and the Arabs of to-day live out
their lives there much as they did under the Fatimites. But
Algeria is a country far more versatile than Egypt, and since the
occupation the Arab has found himself obliged to conspire with
the French in a totally new development of his home, even of
his desert home which has proved more adaptable to change
than was at first believed. So the contact between colonists and
natives is necessarily far closer in Algeria than in Egypt, and
this makes the Algerian native worthy of a more psychological
study than he has hitherto been vouchsafed, while the colonising
of his country becomes more complicated and was, during the
first fifty years, necessarily more cruel.
There are strange workings in the mingled races of this
country which for the first time is being colonised not by
emigrants as in the past, but by colonisers who, good, bad or
indifferent, have absolutely implanted themselves in the land.
A French writer of to-day has endeavoured in a powerful
romance to work out the effects of African climate on certain
races, and in especial on the Spaniard who often seems " enivre
par Tabondance de I'Afrique, emporte par I'ardeur de la terre," *
his blood burnt, as it were by the sun. But the effect of French
blood upon the Algerian Arab will be a yet more interesting
study in the near future. Never, perhaps, has colonising been
carried out in a more original spirit than to-day in Algeria, for
that spirit is one of assimilation, and whatever errors are com-
mitted in its eternal policy are as often as not made in the effort
^ Le Sang des Races. Bertrand.
154 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to assimilate the French with native life. From the first the
idea of possible extermination never entered into the violent
struggles of fifty years ago, though the early scenes of blood-
shed seemed to point that way. On the contrary, the French
have undertaken to solve the problem of African colonisation by
an assimilation which will in time count so many millions more
" Frenchmen " in the world than would otherwise be possible, and
the rapid increase of the native population is encouraged as much
as the decrease of that of France is deplored. Interesting indeed
would it be if wc could see athwart the two or three generations
of hybrids, into what the Franco-Arab Algerian will develop.
So far, though with all praise for the tremendous problem
undertaken, one may ask oneself whether the Arab does not
only change to his disadvantage ? With a decreasing fanaticism
he certainly seems to sacrifice much of his native pride and
energy, and fanaticism, terrible enemy to progress though it
be, would seem to be rather an Arab virtue than otherwise.
Certainly the natives of Morocco or Tunis, ferociously fanatical
as they are, seem nevertheless finer types of an independent and
proud people than are found here, and it is difficult not to com-
pare them somewhat curiously with their town brothers of this
country, whose mosques are desecrated, and who watch the infidel
striding through them with a profound indifference or a lazy
insolence.
However well assimilation between the French and their
native subjects may answer in the long run, it should be kept
distinct from any false sentiment ; but there was a moment
when the French had a vain ideal in their colonising quite
distinct from any we may have in ours. They believed in
** loving" the native. Such an idea had never entered into the
English attitude towards a conquered race, nor as far as history
tells us, did it ever affect the treatment of such in the past. The
effort was certainly never made by Roman, or Vandal, or Arab
View of Algiers from Mustapha Superieur.
ALGERIA 155
himself, though the last did come clothed as liberator from the
Roman yoke. Justice is the only feeling that the native heart
feels from outside, and in the long run that stern and even bitter
form of sentiment will touch the only chord that can vibrate
beneath the touch of a conquering hand. So, what was written
of the conquest in Algeria during those romantic days of
Fromentin and George Sand, was always written in a spirit of
sentiment which cast a rainbow over the cold douche of policy,
while the active colonising itself was carried out in a very
different spirit, and such men as Rovigo were never held in
check in their treatment of the natives by the ghost of an ideal.
The last of those sacred words of France — Fraternity — has
been found inseparable from its trio and as equally incompre-
hensible to the Arab mind as the two first are to the mind of the
old regime. No Frenchman, however enthusiastic, would dream
of singing to-day the old song, —
" Mes amis, mes amis,
Soyons de notre pays,
Oui, soyons de notre pays ; "
rather would he force himself to say, " Adieu, charmant pays de
France," and graft himself as well as he can upon a foreign shore.
So in reading the voluminous literature on Algeria of three
decades ago, written during the very period when the iron hand
of militarism was heaviest upon the natives, a false enthusiasim
is found running through the views of that time, belonging,
naturally perhaps, to what has been termed the period of child-
hood in Algeria, the period when the events of the conquest
present a stirring confusion of success and languid indecision, of
treachery and broken treaties, friendly exchange of words and
sudden blows, all the lights and shades, in fact, of a too-youthful
struggle which history now makes light of or carefully hides
away within the dark pages of old regimes which are judged
156
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
capable of all atrocities. That early enthusiasm of the French,
if it has not disappeared, has certainly changed ; it belongs to the
Romantic spirit which penetrated into all the life of France at
that time, even into their colonising, stained though that was
with scenes of cruelty, and giving the whole story of that time as
it has come down to us, something
at once fantastic and uncertain,
desultory, violent with a kind of
one - sided, crusading fanaticism,
poetic with the sentiment of the
Patrie which is now dead, illusive
with the Utopia of a Fraternity
which died before it ever stretched
wings.
But, sentiment or hard reality
apart, there was indeed a fine savour
of the Middle Ages about the
Algerian conquest, darkened with
acts of appalling brutality but lit
up with heroic courage on either
side ; Arab and European alike
exhibiting that wild mixture of
dauntlessness and unchivalric treachery which marked the crusad-
ing days. Well may the dramatic sight of Constantine, that
city of the air, as the Arabs of the Middle Ages called it,
awaken memories of the historic sieges of which it was once the
theatre. On three sides it hangs over a formidable ravine echo-
ing with the roar of the great river which only calms its rage in
a distant valley bordered with orange groves and scarlet pome-
granate flowers, as though worn out with its struggle with
Nature. *' Cest la residence du Diable," exclaimed a French
officer as he confronted those terrible heights before the final
onslaught. No wonder that a certain gloom hangs over this
A Native Type, Algeria.
ALGERIA 157
town of narrow streets and bold outlines, a wild gloomy charm
such as must cling by all the rights of tradition over a fortress
city tingling with scenes of bloodshed and yet legendic with the
calm pride of a classic age, the home of one who could influence
such a mind as that of Marcus Aurelius.
There are battle-fields which are disappointing to the student
of history, so tame and peaceful does the present scene seem in com-
parison with some tragic story. But here for once, the " mise en
sc^ne " of the drama seems still terrible in its frowning reality, filling
the mind with admiration of the courage which could confront it
without flinching. In their final assault the French had to meet not
only a natural enemy of perpendicular rock and almost impassable
roads over which the rain had lately been driving, as it had once
fallen in torrents when poor Choiseul led his forlorn hope up to the
walls, but a gallant foe as well. The Bey Ahmed was a man of
extraordinary energy and magnetic influence on his Kabyle and
Turkish followers, sustained, too, to the last by the hope of Turkish
reinforcement. But the French army was not likely to be beaten
twice on the same spot nor daunted by the burning villages around,
the shrieking women on the terraces, the hidden foe. Into those
narrow streets with barred windows, from which came a ceaseless
fire, down into which fell the ruined walls of the houses, crushing
and wounding men and officers beneath the debris. Combe took the
place of Lamoriciere, who was blinded with a terrific explosion of
powder magazines ; the ladders were flung up against the walls, and
the town pierced. In the distance, along the mountain height in the
direction of the south, Ahmed was seen galloping away under the
fresh morning sun ; the cords by which the remnant of the
garrison and inhabitants had sought to escape over the rocks,
broke, and plunged them into the ravine. The town was taken.
The old prophecy that the Christians would return at a
certain date — between ten and twelve on a Friday morning — for
which reason the inhabitants always carefully locked their town
158 , IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
gates during those hours, was curiously fulfilled at the taking of
Constantine, which fell upon a Friday morning at ten o'clock.^
With the memory of this siege comes that of the Arab Abd-el-
Kadir, and who can deny that there was something fine about the
personality of this man, a mingling of the truest warlike spirit
with the religious pride of the desert, a kind of Algerian Jugurtha,
holding back the tide of the inevitable with unwavering courage.
He bore a charmed name, that of the patron saint of all unfortu-
nates, the prince among marabouts, and it was in a chapel at
Baghdad, consecrated to that holy man, that one day in 1828, so
runs the legend, while the youth was praying with his father, the
saint appeared to him under the guise of a negro, holding in his
hand three oranges. "Where is the Sultan of the West?"
asked the disguised saint, " these oranges are for him." " We
have no sultan among us," answered the father. *' You will soon
have one," said the negro, and placing the three oranges in the
young man's hands he vanished. Three years later Abd-el-
Kadir was preaching the Holy War against the French, and with
10,000 men vainly besieging Oran.
No common adventurer was this Arab leader, but a man of
education, a traveller who had seen Egypt and the Orient,
though always "a travers Islam." Skilled in all manly exercises,
hallowed with a double pilgrimage to Mecca, distinguished by
his piety and zeal, a splendid horseman who, like the Numides
of old, owed half his success to his steed —
"On his back Death Himself cannot touch me,
He fears the sound of his hoof" —
he had, it is said, all the elegant dignity of the Arab aristocrat
with the austere mind of a saint. But though he rose on the
horizon at a moment when Oran, in complete anarchy, belonged
neither to France or to Morocco, he showed the limitations of
^ Alg'erie. Par Rozet et Carette.
^SST^Stej*^*
Entrance to the Mosque of Sioi, Abd-er-Rahman.
ALGERIA 159
his race in inventing nothing new to meet such an opening for
ambition, but only endeavoured to correct the Turkish form of
government that had gone before. His force and his weakness
alike lay in his profound mepris for all that the infidel could
teach, and the French, after having to their cost despised him,
have ended by praising him too much.
The description of Abd-el-Kadir by the Due d'Aumale after
his capture brings this finest of Algerian patriots clearly before us :
— " Abd-el-Kadir is a man of about forty. His face is intelligent,
his eyes, large and black, have a severe and imperious expression.
His complexion is tan-coloured ; his face thinned without being
too long ; his black beard is thick and ends in a point. The whole
of his person is austere and recalls the traditional figure of Christ.
His voice is grave and sonorous ; his height, above the medium,
seems robust and wellknit. He wears a black burnous over two
white ones, with yellow maroccan boots, the most simple of
costumes." It is the description of a bold warrior whose day was
over. Indeed, had not prophecy declared long before how the
struggle would end, and had not one Hadji Afca foretold all in
his book of verses : —
*' An army of Christians under God's protection advances towards
us. Algiers — superb Algiers, has been for two centuries under the
tyranny of the Turks. An innumerable army arrives. The French
and the Spanish cross the sea. Algiers falls into the hands of the
Christians. France comes to gather the harvest in our fields. . . ." '
Those fields were stained with blood. But for all the acts
which rendered the name of France odious during the early
years of the Algerian occupation the Republic to-day accuses the
First Empire, pointing out that the names covering it with
such odium were all borne by those of the Imperial Service.
Boyer, nicknamed Peter the Cruel, was an old officer of the days
of the Empire. The Due de Rovigo, whose acts of cruelty only
^ Algerie. Par Rozet et Carette.
i6o
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
an Empire, it is said, could have condoned, was chief of the
Imperial police. Pelissier, who ten years after his act of un-
paralleled brutality in Algeria was made Marshal of France and
then first governor of the colony — such men as those go down
to history not only as men of unprincipled savagery, but as
victims of their country's monarchical errors. Even the
courageous Bugeaud only lived down the
fact that he had soldiered under Napoleon, and
all his adventurous and stormy past, by prov-
ing himself not unworthy of the honours he
received, till the " Pere Bugeaud " became for
the Algerian army what the " Petit Caporal "^
had been for the great army of France. The
verdict of the Republic upon those days is a
severe one. Empires produce easily great
villains and great patriots. It remains still
for the Republic to prove whether it, too,,
can do both.
In no country, not even in France itself,,
is the impress of Bonapartism so powerful as-
here. Its overwhelming force seems to have
destroyed much of the freedom of individual
ambition, to have hall-marked the inhabitants with the brand of
officialdom, the red ribbon which marks the Frenchman's willing
servitude, not his freedom; If there is no place in such a chapter as
this for ponderings on the Gallic mind and the strange transforma-
tion made by a new form of government on a people's personality,
impossible not to regret that every race, even one so brilliantly
gifted and capable as the French, seems to find sooner or later its
Koran, political, religious, social or artistic — something crystallis-
ing and wing-clipping. The leavening-out forces of a Republic
which in France itself finds a resisting yeast in the not yet merely-
historic pride of the noblesse, have full sway here, and the
Algerian Woman.
ALGERIA i6i
Republican atmosphere sits somewhat heavily on this aristocratic
Arab and Turkish centre.
It is for this reason that there is no happy field in Algeria
for individual ambition or policy, though the very men splendidly
able to work out their own lines are there, since at home or
abroad there is no Frenchman, only Frenchmen.
" Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes,
Au cordeau nous alignant tous,
Si des rangs sortent quelques hommes,
Tous nous crions ; a bas les fous ;
On les persecute, on les tue,
Sauf, apr^s un lent examen,
A leur dresser une statue
Pour la gloire du genre humain." ^
So it well befits a Republic worked out on these lines to see
the name of its most colourless president inscribed in letters of
gold on a marble slab near the proud Roman bridge of Al-
Kantara.
The vast field for manoeuvres, the great military hole for
the French soldier in Algeria is, perhaps, a more interesting
study to many than its internal policy and the red tape of its
government. For whatever military action is taken by France
in the near future will be enormously affected by what this
school has taught. Should France be called upon to take
aggressive action in Morocco, the campaign would very probably
be finished far more promptly than the wars that dragged on
intermittently in the days of the last Empire." Indeed it is no
secret in France that the insurrection instigated by the Kabyle
sheik Si-Hamed, in 1868, was allowed to run on by the
^ B^ranger.
* According to the Governor-General, M. Jonnart, the Army of Occupa-
tion has never been in a state of greater efficiency than to-day.
X
1 62 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
indisposition of the army to put an end to a state of things which
brought them promotion and an opportunity of training and
exercising their men in actual warfare, of which the risk of serious
loss or disaster was not great, and in which they hoped to secure
a highly-trained army of veterans. But they reckoned without
their host, as the events proved. The Ecole d'Algerie proved
itself a failure when its methods were employed against the
German army. Accustomed to deal with an enemy whose
military equipment was of an inferior order to their own, the
officers of the Algerian School became insensibly prone to
methods of warfare impossible before an European force. The
frontal attack, unsupported by flanking movements, the bayonet
charge were their tactics, and when met by the profounder
strategy of the German army proved inefficacious. A Memoir
published the other day by a French officer present at the battle
of Sedan,^ describes how General de Wimpfen, *' who had just
returned from Algeria," took over the command at that battle.
He paid no attention to Ducrot's warnings that the German
army was slowly but surely enveloping his forces, insisting upon
making unsupported counter attacks, vainly attempting to break
the circle. Nor did he realise the seriousness of his position
until too late to extricate himself. The guerilla warfare,
then, of 1868, had its share in turning the tide in favour of
Germany.
There is very little of Algeria which is not now opened up
to the tourist who is willing to rough it without change of
clothes for a few weeks, and to count on the hospitality of the
Arabised Berber sheiks to whom, by the bye, it seems more
courteous not to present a letter of introduction from the military
authorities which robs that hospitality of all charm. Divided
into three parallel divisions, each running inland from the sea
over mountain ridges toward the desert, each province of Algeria
^ Mes Souvenirs. Par le General Baron Faverot de Kerbrech. 1905.
ALGERIA
163
has its own *' point de depart," from which by rail and then by
the aid of sturdy but ignoble-looking mules the whole country
can be traversed. From Biskra, the expedition to the great
range of the Aures can be made thus, across arid plains — though
not too arid for terrible swarms of locusts to find their way — past
fair oases and squalid settlements, over
hard tracks and rocky paths towards
the wild ravines of the mountainous
district. Mountain after mountain
ridge is traversed, valley after valley,
each wilder and more solitary, more
inhumanly silent than the one before,
through cold to torrid zone, till a
lovely vegetation is at last reached ;
forests of athletic cedars as proud as
those that fell beneath the destructive
hand of Solomon ; and date-palms, the
very fruit-stones of which are chewed
by enduring teeth and humble appe-
tite. The Berbers of these heights
are of the same race as those of
the Kabyle country, yet absolutely
estranged from them. Sharing the same customs, understanding
each other's language in spite of some linguistic divergencies, the
natural barriers of this strange country have divided them as
though by an impassable ocean. The secret of independence
without the secret of forming a nation has always distinguished
them, true natives of a mountainous land, preserving in their
mountain fastnesses, on the ridges of which, like nobles of the
Middle Ages, they build their castles, the last traditions of their
sturdy past. Whatever civilisation may have been theirs long
ago in their unarabised condition, nothing remains of it now
save a few traces of funereal monumentation. They seem to
Costume of Algerian Women.
1 64 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
have qualities rather than gifts ; a strange mixture of qualities,
the warlike and semi-nomad, with the sedentary' and pastoral.
If the Arab remains faithful to the old Mohamedan precept,
** Where enters the plough, there enters shame also," the Berber
is not ashamed to show his natural love of the earth and its
seasons. Garbed in rough material of his own manufacture, the
gun he has himself turned out upon his shoulder, he can sow his
fields, watch his bee-hives, eat the humblest fare, dispense with
the most rudimentary forms of cleanliness, and yet try his hand
at the very arts which indicate taste and a certain refinement.
These rude people have always shown genuine taste for
ornament, excelling in its manufacture as the Arabs never have.
The fact that their women are neither shut up nor veiled has
encouraged the wearing of fantastic jewellery, and with silver,
enamel and coral, and a few ill-shaped pearls, they turn out a
strongly characteristic work. Not unlike the ruder peasant
jewellery of Italy, the Berber art may, like it, have been influenced
by the Orient, but no Arab influence has ever affected the Berber
workmanship and in it no geometrical designs are ever found.
An interesting suggestion has been made as a means of
preserving the Kabyle jewellery from suff^ering through the bad
or ignorant taste of foreigners to which the Berber to-day is only
too eager to pander. It is suggested that instead of buying
direct from the Kabyle women who purposely load themselves
with an inferior quality of ornament, despoiling their wrists,
arms and ankles to every bidder, the purchaser should apply
directly to a section of the Algerian Museum, devoted to collect-
ing only the best specimens for sale — those, for instance, turned
out by the Beni-Yenni tribe. The same practice, indeed, is
followed in a more serious way with the " finds " of Egypt in
the Cairo Museum.
We know that the Kabyle jewellery exhibited in the Paris
Exhibition of 1900 was entirely pseudo-Arab, manufactured in
ALGERIA 165
Paris itself and out of the cheapest materials. That no genuine
specimens reach the foreign market is, of course, untrue, but
rarely do the best examples. The Berber is more adaptable than
inventive, and we see that when they turn out modern work, such
as the enamelled spoons which had a great success some years
ago, all the native character is lost. This race, which does not
change easily in any of its tastes, preserving intact its own designs
for its own women, and never dreaming of using other than a
wooden spoon, soon learns to manufacture especially for the
foreigner.
The tattooing of the women shows to what a pitch their love
of ornamentation has gone ; for, however purely tribal was the
heraldry of this art in the past, it is now little more than
decorative, and the poorer women who cannot afford much
jewellery make up for it by tattooing their faces. We look upon
this form of facial decoration as singularly barbarous, yet how
near were the great ladies of our most intellectual age to the
same weakness. Did not the ladies of Elizabethan England
patch their faces with
" All the wandering planet's signs,
And some of the fixed stars,"
while such a design as a coach-and-four was an especial favourite }
If "Tame humaine n'est point partout la meme," human weak-
nesses, at least, resemble each other all the world over.
o
CHAPTER XI
Tunisia
" La bas, sur la rive africaine,
Sous le beau ciel elyseene,
Comme il fait bon, comme on est bien ! " — Lemaitre.
Far more '* divinely white " than Algiers is Tunis, a town
where the East and West lie side by side without blending. A
far more laughing and joyous country is Tunisia than Algeria, a
very rose in the fields of northern Africa. To what quality in
the air, the sunlight, the people, this can be ascribed seems to
matter little ; but the vast gloominess about certain parts of
Algeria forms a contrast to this country where Nature's touches
are softer and more sympathetic. The grim fastnesses of
Constantine or the exquisite but slightly sad beauty of Al
Kantara are of quite another world than this, where even in the
lonely plains between Sousa and Tunis no less than in the rich
olive plantations of Sfax or the slowly-diminishing gum-forests
between it and Gafsa, there is something indefinable of **bien
etre " — a soothing sense of peaceful and promising nature over
the very fields still awaiting their olive groves, such as parts of
Italy convey. Tunisia, no less than Italy, is a land of olives,
and gradually the cultivation of cereals is yielding to them. In
the Sahel, where twenty centuries have passed with their violent
civil wars, invasions, and religious agitations, the massive roots
of the ancient trees have resisted destruction and thrown out
new ramifications with every spring.
If Algeria seems like some African Spain, Tunisia is the
Italy that borders with an ineffable softness the stern line of the
167
1 68 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
desert. Let any lover of that land cross the dancing waves
from Trapani to Tunis and wander, no matter where, even
down the very boulevards of the Republic itself, where on the
shop-windows every Italian inscription of a decade ago has
vanished — and he will find suggestion of the people and shores
behind him everywhere, no less than the living proof of their
language. Often does it seem that, given a language has its
influence on a people's atmosphere no less than has education,
that of Italy has a distinctly poetising effect on the inhabitants
of foreign lands. It is a veritable music of life which, however
obstinately it may slide over the pros and cons of active
problems, inspires and beautifies whatever may catch its echo.
Tunis is doubly beautiful and doubly interesting to those who
catch this note, a note lost in Algeria, where the echoes are
broken up by the isolation of the emigrated Italian groups, and
the therefore more direct influence of the French upon them.
The colonisers of Tunisia to-day might be wise in not seeking
to destroy this faint echo of a glorious past, and in doing away
with their " idee fixe " of its political significance.
All this grace of language and character has penetrated even
the Moorish parts of Tunis, mingling with it instead of jarring,
imparting to the crowds of Arab and Moorish natives something
at once familiar and yet distinct. " Dans le Sicilien," says Guy
de Maupassant, '* on trouve d^ja beaucoup de I'Arabe. II en a la
gravity d'allures, bien qu'il tienne del'Italien une grande vivacit6
d'esprit. Son orgueil natal, son amour des titres, la nature de sa
fierte et la physionomie meme de son visage le rapprochent aussi
davantage de I'Espagnol et de I'ltalien. Mais ce qui donne sans
cesse, d^s qu'on pose le pied en Sicile, I'impression de I'Orient,
c'est le timbre de la voix, Tintonation nasale des crieurs des
rues. . . . On la retrouve partout, la note aigue de I'Arabe
cette note qui semble descendre du front dans la gorge, tandis
que, dans le Nord, elle monte de la poitrine a la bouche. Et la
A Street in Tunis.
TUNISIA 169
chanson trainante, monotone et douce entendue, en passant, par
la porte ouverte d'une maison, est bien la meme par le syst^me
et I'accent que celle chantee par le cavalier vetu de blanc qui
guide les voyageurs a travers les grands espaces nus du d6sert."
The Italian influence has undoubtedly helped to resist the
violent changes with which the French have always followed up
the possession of their colonies, guided blindly by the formula
dear to them of creating all over the world " de nouvelles
Frances." In Tunis the Arab quarters and customs are at least
much the same as what they were fifty years ago, and were it
not for the absolute cleanliness and improved roads, the Beys of
the past would still recognise their capital, its kaleidoscopic
colours, clustered domes and minarets, and wonderful medley of
humanity. The rolling gait of the Jewish women and the pale
blue robes of the men, the slow shuffle of negroes, the gliding of
Moorish figures, white-robed and black-masked, would pass them
as of old, garbed in historic garments and still more historic rags.
The life of the winding souks, Rembrandt-shadowed, miraculously
flecked with light through narrow ways where
" . . . il se plait aux visions
Que dans les ruelles etroites
Machinent I'ombre et les rayons
En I'absence des lignes droites,"
is as vivid in its way as that of the souks of Cairo. And what a
charm in the buying and selling of the East ! Infinitely sordid
as it may be, it plays upon the human character with a far more
subtle touch than is ever felt in the North. The pulses of
Oriental life beat as quickly though so delicately over the
bargain of a jewel or garment as with love or hate, and some-
thing of this hidden fire is felt by us, all unconsciously though it
be. Market life is an incident with us, in the East it means far
more than that ; and all round are the large dark eyes that gaze
lyo
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
into futurity with such calm as they stake their wit and infinite
patience upon the trifles of daily needs. We really know very
little of the human mind of Eastern races. There may be some-
thing grand, not merely trivial, in the whole art of buying and
selling which is hidden from us. The art of exchange in wit or
money can be so delicate, plays upon so many gifts in the East
— poetry as well as exquisite falsity — but we have robbed it of
its poetic and artistic features, and clothed it in a
kind of mental sackcloth and ashes.
The bazars of Tunis are almost disquietingly
clean — one wonders where all the historic per-
fumes have concentrated themselves, for even that
willing scapegoat, the lake, is far too burdened to
hold more within its bosom. But be this as it may,
the air blows sweet and fresh through the twisting
ways, and suddenly a whiff of strong sweet essence
of rose indicates the vicinity of the Souk of Per-
fumes, where the most graceful slight of hand is
carried on over bottles identical in appearance but
with infinite capacities for resisting their adver-
tised gouttCy all so delicately contrived that again
is admiration roused at the art of their com-
merce. A certain rich lion watches at the entrance to the
markets of Tunis to-day, ready to pounce upon his prey and
initiate him into Oriental tact, but pass him unnoticed, resist his
offers of incomparable goods parted with as gifts rather than
bargains, till, lost among the moving mass of men and donkeys,
one may safely observe and wander unnoticed. But in spite of
the interest it is almost terrible — this mass of opposite races,
each with his own world in his face, which none else can know or
understand. The Jew with his melancholy eye and drooping
lip — it is not the aquiline nose which mark him here — separates
himself easily from the crowd, passing softly in his white haik
A Nubian Woman of
Tunis.
Doorway of the Great Mosque, Tunis.
TUNISIA
171
which the rabbis of Paris have lately imposed upon him ; the
Maltese, close medley of Arab and European blood ; the mass of
Arab-speaking Tunisians whom it is impossible to catalogue
correctly any longer ; the Bedouin, and the Moor, all pass with
their strange non-seeing eyes, and if we look down, a new
A Receiver of Custom Duties.
physiognomy of feet comes toward us : shuffling sandals, slim dark
children's little toes, absurd Moorish shoes with European heels,
firm and sculpturesque bare-feeted limbs, black boots that totter
beneath the weight of Jewish women, yellow shoes trodden out of
all shape, dragged along by mere force of habit, a very gallery of
moving shapes these, but equally evasive, equally hard to follow.
Now and then a Moorish woman passes, slowly, like a blind person,
her face swathed in mournful veils. Has she just bargained over
172 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
some richly embroidered bodice, or purchased fresh supplies of
orange water or jasmine ? or perhaps vented the Moorish passion
for pearls and found some fresh one embedded in an old jewel.
Anything from 1500 to 2000 francs can be paid for the old
baroque pearls of the country, and according to the Oriental
legend, Moorish women brighten their pearls by giving them to
a fowl to swallow, then withdrawing them through its cut throat —
a decidedly less pleasant doctoring than our washing in hot
water and drying in rice powder.
With the sight of the Grande Mosque opening right into the
souks, comes a sudden thought — in what consists the track of
the Andalusian Moors in Tunisia ? What did they build, what
name acquired here equal to that in Morocco or even Algiers ?
Vague and without brilliancy was their decadence in this country,
nor can Kairowan, destroyed in part over and over again, compare
in its story of fairy palaces and civilisation with that of Fez.
The Mecca of Africa was founded from the first on militarism
and fanaticism, never assuming as intellectual a sway under
Arab as under Berber dynasties, while hundreds of Arab families
preferred migrating from there to Fez, to rival in that rich
centre their own mosques with those of the Andalusian Moors.
It was to Fez, too, that the Moors exiled from Spain carried their
reserves of wealth and their unequalled fanaticism, the last as
fierce to-day as yesterday. But Kairowan, once so sacred and so
unknown that even sixty years ago the mosque was believed to be
in ruins, opened its portals to the infidel without a struggle. The
psychology of the Arabs of Kairowan is more than usually strange ;
as strange and evasive as the town itself rising with its eighty-
five mosques hidden within high walls, all pale and sand-coloured,
amidst the sparse pallor of olives, of here and there a dusty palm
with its feet, as the Arabs say, in the water, and its head in the
flames of the sun. Completely Arab in form, its ancient
fanaticism has been contaminated as by some mysterious force
TUNISIA
173
quite other than that of persuasion or compulsion ; other, too,
than might penetrate through close contact with an European
population, since there are but some hundred French and Italians
grouped near the entrance to the town, while the native popula-
tion of Arabs, Moors, Berbers and those tribes supposed to be
gipsy in origin, numbers over 23,000.
Typical and Eastern as are the towns of Tunisia, they are
more Arab than Moorish. Save in a few buildings such as the
/^'li/
Minaret of Sidi Okba, Kairowan.
Bardo, there is but little trace of Moorish luxury of the past ;
and we may well ask, Does Spain, then, not follow us here at all
with Moorish tradition, with legends of fabulous wealth and
gorgeous mosques as in Morocco ? Did the wave of Moorish
life, exiled from the peninsula, make no effort to regain its
earlier fields here, build another Fez, concentrate its light of
learning in the country over which, like locusts, its Arab ancestry
had passed and prayed and pillaged ? As Ferdinand's efforts to
acquire an African dominion weakened, the Moors of Andalusia
might well have constructed another centre where so many seeds
174 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
had already been sown, have brought into their African Mecca
the same brilliant civilisation left behind them, and which for
a while in the ninth century flourished under Berber rule in
Kairowan. Still more might they have carried on the agricultural
enlightenment in which they had so excelled in Spain, since this
country, by every tradition at least, offered an even happier field
for such than either Algeria or Morocco, and the Moorish experi-
ence was rich with centuries of experience on the peninsular. But
the Arab hold on Tunisia had never been other than religious.
The nomads of Arabia were content to till the plains and leave
the rich mountains and forests to the Berber tribes, overlooking
the fact pointed out by history that this country had always resisted
colonisation in the true sense of the word through the cultivation
of its lovely pastures alone. Since Roman days, Tunisia's mis-
guiding advertisement of classic granary seems to have misled
them no less than it has since misled foreign colonisers. This
country of peculiar promise, still regarded as of boundless
agricultural wealth, for there are yet valleys and mountains to be
explored, has always demanded labour and capital such as even in
their prime the Moors of Spain had never needed to expend upon
the vast fields of Andalusia, and which certainly neither Roman
nor Mohamedan had ventured in Africa. Wealth was sucked from
their African colonies by those colonisers of the past, rather than
passed into them, an error in the long run which still seems to
tempt colonisers of to-day. Even in Roman days who knows
whether this famous granary of Rome indicated more than the
natural produce of a rich but carelessly cultivated land, since the
size of the population it furnished on Italian soil is unknown, and
Rome may have possessed many other granaries as well. Certainly
colonising to-day is an expensive pursuit, and only the country
that can spend lavishly upon its colonies is likely to hold them.
Capital, not labour, seems to back up such success now.
If Algeria is just such a field for a rich country's lavish
TUNISIA
175
expenditure as well as for assimilating European and native life,
and for inculcating the French theory of " moralisation par le
travail," Tunisia is doubly interesting with its added problems
of emigration. French colonisation there seems assuredly
doomed to be carried on by a small minority against a
steadily increasing majority of Spanish, Maltese and Sicilian
emigrants who themselves have long set the example of patient
labour, colonisers whom France could neither imitate in numbers
A Mosque at Kairowan.
nor rival in industry. For long the feeling in France was
strong against these emigrants, and the statistics of the European
population in Tunisia were held from the public for fear of rous-
ing emotion in the country. But in 1 900-1 901, M.Jules Saurin,
an apostle of French colonisation, roused popular feeling by his
statement of facts, insisting on the importance of holding the pro-
tectorate by increasing the flow of emigration. It would seem
as though the French had emigration somewhat on the brain to-
day, attaching exaggerated importance to the preponderance of
their own nationality in their protectorate as in their colonies.
Yet in Egypt, where the native population is four times as vast, and
the area far greater, the percentage of British is absurdly small,
while the increasing influx into the country of Greeks and Italians
176 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
is viewed by us with profound indifference. The very fact that
the French show themselves so opposed as a people to deserting
their native soil points as nothing else can to the internal pros-
perity of their land and their subsequent carelessness in exploiting
labour elsewhere. There is an old saying
'^:^S^'%, that a rich man's daughter makes the best
^ i m\ P*^^^ man's wife, but the principle must be
exactly reversed in the case of practical
colonisation, for the half-starved labourer
who leaves an overtaxed hovel behind him,
and (in this case) risks five out of his few
francs' savings to pay for his passage from
Trapani to Tunis, makes the best and most
enduring of settlers abroad. A Sicilian
arriving in Tunisia penniless, considers
himself " homme arriv6" if at the end
of eight years of incessant and self-denying
labour and economy he has acquired a
plot of ground capable of producing a
thousand francs a year. Such is the range
of ambition in the emigrating classes, the
lack of other significance than that of the
struggle for existence, the blind instinct
A Native Girl of Kairowan. l • i. i_ i L j ^l i •
which has always pushed the workmg
families of Italy from the poverty, the errors of government,
the malaria, the inertia of their own shores to those where,
as in this case, their own climate seems to greet them once
more with a new and kinder welcome. Yet this instinctive
exploitation of small patches of ground by Italians in Tunisia
has been a source of profound anxiety to France. Their
own sinking of capital into large properties cannot populate
the country as rapidly and as closely as do the small land-
owners clustered together. Is the anxiety of the French
Entrancp: to the Mosquh; of Sidi Okbar, Kirouan.
TUNISIA 177
misplaced or not ? is a vast number of humbly-exploited
farms and vineyards, never perhaps producing their full
measure owing to the tenacious habit of Sicilians in ignor-
ing modern appliances, likely to turn the tide against a people
as rich and as go-ahead as the French ? We should rather
ask whether a country had ever acquired a colony under
circumstances more favourable than that of Tunisia by France,
its native population already softened by contact with a persever-
ing and laborious race, thoroughly able from the similar conditions
of their native land to understand the soil and endure the
climate ; a people too, whom native and French alike pull well
with in Africa. If capital is peculiarly necessary in the colonising
of Tunisia, Italy has shown conclusively that she had none to
expend until too late. As for the importance of what is termed
the demonstrating of " Italianity," in Tunisia, the French them-
selves recognise its intangible character/ Certainly the problem
known as that of the " Sicilian Invasion " is an interesting
one, but it seems more just in the present day to recognise the
mass of bourgeoisie and humble workmen and their families classed
under that name rather as breadwinners without leanings towards
political questions than as a menace to France.
But the French Utopia remains that of a colony not merely
politically but literally French in language and thought. Our
colonising in small numbers, keeping the habits and customs of
natives, the character of the land, in fact, fitting our system to
the country instead of carrying into each the same ideas, is not
theirs. While obliged in Tunisia to encourage in their own
interest the Italian emigration for the colonising of their colony,
they are endeavouring, as though all depended thereon, to graft
their language on a vast foreign population still in close touch
with its native land and continually drifting back there or re-
ceiving fresh instalments of families into their midst. It has
^ " Le Peuplement Italien en Tunisie et en Algeriey Par Gaston Loth. 1905.
178 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
always been exceedingly difficult to precise whether or not Italian
emigrants are likely to take root in a foreign land, to absent
themselves in entire family groups from their country for more
than one or even half a generation. If a Sicilian bids farewell to
his soil for ever, his son will most probably return there, '* les
liens de parente ne se relachent point, les manages se combinent,"
the chain of French influence through language and school
education is broken and must be soldered again elsewhere. A
French writer gives as his opinion that " sous I'influence de
I'eloignement de la mfere-patrie, de I'isolement des individus,
ritalien tend a s'unir au Fran9ais," but such cases are rare in
Tunisia, for the mother country is near, the Italian emigrants
live in groups, keeping noticeably, together though joining freely
in the national fites. Nevertheless, since the French can con-
tribute but indirectly towards the active colonisation of this
country already exploited by other nationalities, it is on the
spreading of their language, the instruction of their schools, their
" influence morale " which can be no doubt but gratefully felt by
Sicilian or Maltese, that the French rely to-day for their hold on
the country. They believe that a new French population can be
consolidated by these means, a new nation composed of the re-
presentatives of the three Latin people bordering the shores of
the Mediterranean and to whom easy terms of naturalisation are
off^ered, instead of a colony of groups, each jealous of preserving
its own character, language and national habits.
But whether the Italian settlers in Tunisia will ever be so
coalesced, is for time to prove. By every right of historic
association Tunisia is Roman and Berber rather than either
Moorish or Turkish, and for upwards of the last hundred years,
in spite of the corsairs and pirates infesting the Mediterranean
before the French occupation, Italians have migrated to northern
Africa in ever-increasing numbers. This instinctive emigration
in the track of their ancestors has given their settlement there
The Mirhab in the Mosque of Sidi Okbar, Kairouan.
TUNISIA 179
to-day an historic interest that the French cannot of course
acquire. Not much, in a practical sense, this time-worn associa-
tion. It brings the mind imperceptibly towards the abstract
rather than the real, the past rather than the present, in this
land which the desert thrusts towards the shores of the island
of legends.
Strange is it that here in Africa much in the setting of the
land's shape carries the mind irresistibly to musings on Greece ;
the cloud-confined background of hills glowing in rose and blue
at sunset murmur less of Phenician than of Greek legend. The
intimate character of the whole Mediterranean littoral has been
so perfectly symbolised in the Odyssey and in Greek literature
that anything beautiful found about its coasts takes a place
naturally in the thoughts as part of the supreme song written in
Hellas. If that song has lost its wonderful echo along the
Algerian shores, here at least the lover of the classics will recover
it, and traversing the old road from Tunis to Carthage, the sea
and the crest of hills beyond awaken their responsive chords of
memory, till myth and legend, Homeric or of Pindar, are with
him. Over the stretches of fields flecked with the gold of
spring, past the sea-lake skimmed by rosy flamingoes, a smooth
interminable road leads from Tunis to Carthage. Monotonous
it is, yet how gay in spite of the ghost-life of ancient sites
where those two great powers aspiring to the dominion of
the world met for their final bouts, the famous duels of the
Punic Wars. Here the great Roman campaign was fought,
the war with Jugurtha so vividly described by Sallust and
which, although now usually relegated to the lumber-room
or the back-waters of the instruction of youth, is one of
the most interesting documents we possess on the character
and methods of Roman civil and military administration
under the Republic. Still more does it deserve to be read
in these days of colonial enterprise and civil organisation. A
i8o IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
curious document indeed is it upon the character of the people
who were destined to be the conquerors of the world. On
perusing the extraordinary history of political corruption, of
patrician narrow-mindedness and demagogic imbecility, of un-
restrained military ambitions, one is tempted to doubt whether
any other race in the world were ever more absolutely un-
principled in public and private life than those very Romans,
the race to which we owe most of our ideas of law and con-
stitutional government and whose military record has been the
most enduring in history.
In what, then, lay the secret of the preponderance of the
Roman state ? Much has been written on this subject, nor is it
within the scope of this work to discuss it at length, but at least
one feature of Roman civilisation may arrest attention, for it
bears closely on another subject, the struggle between the Moors
and the Spaniards in the peninsula. The Romans were the
race in antiquity who gave the family the highest place in their
conception of the State, and the whole of Mediaeval Europe, in a
sense the offspring of the Roman Empire, was no doubt in this
respect largely influenced in its social life. Wandering in Spain
amongst the shadows of departed greatness of the Moors, admira-
tion of the intelligence evinced in their work goes hand in hand
with the knowledge that the people they had conquered had
never shown any right to possess their miles of beautiful but
unreclaimed soil. The civilising influence of the Moors, their
architecture, their irrigation works, point rather to them as the
people chosen by energy and intellect to turn the desert tracks of
Spain into blooming gardens. Was it, then, the laxer traditions
of family life inherent in the followers of Islam which proved
the weak link in the chain that finally sundered and ultimately
drove them back to African soil, that brought them to the state
of decay, politically and socially, in which we find them to-day ?
The Roman family was the powerful undisputed unit of the
TUNISIA
i«i
national life, holding it together in spite of the corruption of
the times and the general laxity of politics. The authority of
the family head was unquestioned, extending even to power over
life and death. The Roman woman was a woman indeed, in com-
parison to whom the Moorish wife of the harem was a brilliant
doll or a slave. The belief in the sanctity of the family ties was not
merely social but religious, hemmed in by every sort of right and
Moorish Castle.
observance, such as the grim funeral procession in which the
living members of the circle marched in solemn line, each one
wearing the wax mask of a departed ancestor.
To-day Moor and Roman alike have left no shadow of their
curious cross paths along our track. Nothing more wholly
peaceful can be imagined than this historic route towards the sea.
Is it possible that storms ever raged against such shores, ever
beat under the half-constructed walls of the young city of
merchants and sailors, of beautiful Carthage with its sweeping
ports and proud buildings above ; that harsh waves ever cast up
the wanderer from Troy upon the sands. Let those who would
see this spot choose a day in spring, calm, windless, cloudless.
1 82 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
when the sea is clear enough to reflect in imagination the city
that has so completely vanished. A day when the Mediterranean
looks — what it was — a Carthaginian lake into which the impassable
pillars of Hercules have sunk away till the world of the ancients
seems to pass like a wonderful dream from legendic to geo-
graphical grandeur. Come to this site on some clear day when
all the genius of gold which once illumined Carthage shines
round us still in the passionate sunshine. But the city itself,
where is it, where is its sepulchre .? Passed into Nature herself,
that most beautiful tomb in the world with which she seems to
mark for ever an illustrious site, spending upon it something of
the love bestowed upon the grave. The clear sea which once
had washed against the Ionian pillars of the port, the smiling
plain from which the city rose, the bright pall of grass, these
envelop the beautiful spot beneath which lie the burial grounds,
the skeletons that have lain ever since amidst their Greco-
Egyptian jewellery, with their faces turned towards the rising
sun, towards the East from which their life once hailed.
The people of Carthage have, rightly or not, obtained a
reputation in history as a pre-eminently uncultured nation in the
truest sense of the word. No remains of a literature have come
down to us, nor is there anything whatever to show us that they
were distinguished for other qualities than a talent for the organi-
sation of commerce. Much, then, is it to be regretted that even
their art, their architecture, with its convincing proof, has been
lost as well. It might have borne witness, who knows, to the
capacity of a people who could produce such a transcendent
military genius as Hannibal ; an exploring spirit such as, in other
periods, has only belonged to races capable of intellectual life,
and only to those races when at the summit of their powers. But
our questioning awakes now not even an echo. It is only the
imagination which, startled by the human contrasts of those days
conjured up by memory and site, feels the confusing nothing-
TUNISIA 183
ness in which such characters among man as a Hannibal, a
Jugurtha, a Saint Augustine, moved and thought.
" Delenda est Carthago,"
said the stern, practical Roman, and so completely has Carthage
disappeared that nothing but a few broken fragments remain.
No ruins, barely a stone standing upon another, but the effect is
magical ; and as on some undefined terrace overlooking the
smooth slopes, the gorgeous figure of Salammbo may still be
evoked, dim and saffron-skinned, supplicating the secrets of the
gods, her face turned towards Tunis, shadow of Carthage itself.
CHAPTER XII
Sands of the Desert
" Le desert . . . n'est pas decevant, lui, meme ici, a ce seuil oh il ne fait que
commencer d'apparaitre. Son immensite prime tout, agrandir tout, et,
en sa presence, la mesquinerie des etres s'oublie."
— Le Desert. Pierre Loti.
From Algiers to Biskra is a day's journey. It takes us from the
seashore to the shore of the desert, to one of the most exquisite
of oases in the world and within touch of the most beautiful one
known. Without in any way entrenching on Egyptian scenery,
there is, of course, an underlying similitude between all desert
borderlands, the same overlapping of silence and sound, of
struggling life and eternal sleep ; the same calm conflict with
Nature, '* ou la nature semble elle-meme expirer." There are,
too, the same sunsets that almost terrify with their gorgeous
conflagrations, and an evening calm surpassing that of seaside or
valley or mountain. The little new life of the outer world can-
not change all this. The modern element is all too far from its
base, mentally as well as geographically, to profoundly colour it,
and streets and houses alike appear destined to rise, flicker with
lights, and vanish away no less absolutely than those of the old
Roman Bescera, of which not a trace remains. The mass of
tourists and invalids who, in spite of a very stolid discourage-
ment on the part of the Government, have made of Biskra a
delightful hospital garden, seems a composite growth without
permanent roots. The mosque-shaped casino, the hotel minaret,
the confusion of Arab styles, the gardens that savour of some
dim Pare Monceau, the cardinal's theatrical monument — what
are all these but landmarks of our hour ? Even the gardens of
2 A 185
1 86 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
Landon, so sedately and coldly artificial, shut out the wild freedom
of the vegetation of the oasis and imprison a luxurious kind of
fictitious Orientalism which holds aloof from the life of the spot
— the life of the oasis's struggle for existence untouched by the
breath of luxury.
Turning into the dust-white, noiseless streets of Biskra, we
find the *' picturesque " element is distinctly different from that
of any other place in the world. It is theatrical to such a degree
that each one feels himself a spectator and leaves it as he would
some theatre scene, with a mingled sense of interest, artistic
fascination and, perhaps, disgust. Here in the Rue Sainte
of the Arabs, where smiling visitors sit in their shady helmets
sipping coffee, sketching, making desperate attempts to snapshot
the " timid " beauties of the place, or watching the silent Arab
loafers passing in and out among the crowd, among the magnifi-
cent horses and their riders, the donkeys and stray camels, the
uniforms of the military, the blazing eyes of the native children,
the languid walk of the invalids — all the chorus of the scene is
before us. Here is an Arab who offers little leather goods for
sale, another bearing a tray of native sweets, another with a soft
grey jerboa suspended by its fragile leg, and this last it is hard
to resist, for *' there is none for a wonder like he, half bird, half
mouse," little desert ghost with large black eyes for searching
the night, hider in holes, drinking nothing, touching but a
sun-dried leaf, an invisible grain of vegetable life here and there
upon the sands.
But the brilliance of the scene is centred about the dancing
women of Biskra, the Aulad-Nails squatting in groups along the
pavement and not, as in Cairo or Constantine, in Oriental obscurity
behind the bars of windows, laughing, mysterious, indifferent.
How many years have some of them been collecting the triple
necklace of golden sequins without which their tribe will give
them no welcome on their return to its midst, nor find them the
SANDS OF THE DESERT
187
husband who asks no questions ? Side by side they sit, young
face by face seared with copper-coloured wrinkles. Those who
genuinely hail from Laghouat, from the large and wealthy
Bedouin tribe which occupies the interior, are said to be gipsy
in origin, but very different are their ways of life from those of
the gipsy girls of Spain or England who, profoundly careless of
Courtyard of the Bech Aga's House, Biskra.
ideals, have a moral pride which is incorruptible. Gorgeous
indeed is their dress, jewels sparkle on their brows, arms and
ankles. The ** great eyes of their rings " flash in the violent
sunshine. Round their necks hang chains of gold pieces, their
seals of the past. Here is one with dyed finger-tips pounding
fresh supplies of henna in a weighty mortar, there is another, and
she is really fair, half asleep against an open door, another whose
magnificent headdress draws away attention from the hideous
countenance beneath. These gipsies of Algeria are adepts in
hypnotism, and the inkblot dropped upon the palm or back of
the hand encouraged the use of zinc and copper discs for inducing
1 88 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
sleep which crept northwards some sixty years ago.* The arts
they dabble in are many, and so intense and magnetic is their
gaze that the '* Evil Eye " of the gipsy is proverbial.
Is this scene which, like a lantern slide, is lit up for tourists
during the crowded months of Biskra, and advertised in the
French guide-books as " danseuses interessantes dans les cafes
maures " — is it really Oriental or a pistachio of East and West ?
Whatever it be, it is a blot of colour which refuses to be obliter-
ated in the modern theatre scene of Biskra.
There are, too, other blots of colour that move slowly and
sedately through the town on days of festival — the gorgeous
palanquins of the harems, balanced on swaying camels. The
name given them is hardly correct, as, properly speaking, a
palanquin denotes a seat suspended by cords ; they are rather
travelling cages covered with cloths of every hue and bound
round and round with scarves of silk or linen. The grand
seigneur of the place, that erewhile wealthy Arab aristocrat whose
fortune a long period of enforced hostility to strangers has
cruelly undermined, is the owner of superb specimens. Within
these huge wooden frames hide the women and children during
the long transit from town to town, but their dark eyes peep out
through the folds, and little brown fingers lift aside the curtains
and gaze out with idle eagerness on the slowly passing sand
dunes and the groups of palms. Eyes, I said, but how often
one only, since the film of blindness claims usually one or other
of even the richer children's beautiful eyes.
Turning from these spots of living colour, and the street
scenes and the monotonous beat of the darbouka, how soft are
the tints of the distant hills, how exquisitely soft and far away,
yet near ; if not many, nevertheless most beautiful are the walks
and drives of Biskra, either past careless gardens seen through
the openings of mud walls towards the old village, or towards
"• ^ Burton.
SANDS OF THE DESERT
189
the shores of the desert through mimosa groves, or the picnic
drive to Sidi Okba across the sand dunes. Whether the mosque
there is worthy of the hot drive or not is, it seems, a matter of
opinion. To some it alone would seem well worth while
journeying to Biskra to see. The view
from the minaret through milk-white
openings, far across the 70,000 palm
tops, over the miserable and tortuous
streets and the whitewashed courts of
the houses with dark figures crouching
in their shadows, melts far away into the
distances. Rising through the still air
comes the buzz of the Koran from the
schools below, where, among all those
rauque voices there is not one who can
make a mistake which will escape the
ear of the instructor. Sidi Okba is, in
spite of its apparent squalor, an im-
portant religious centre, a '* Zaou'ia," as
it is called, of mosque, school, and tomb
of founder ; one of the communities
of marabouts who, in spite of the
religious unity of Islam, nevertheless often acquires sufficient
power to rouse bitter jealousy from the Djouad or aristocratic
Arabs, who accuse them of obtaining too much power and riches
under the shelter of godliness. From whence arises the saying
that from every Zaouia a serpent always issues forth.
The very soul of Islam seems to hide in this little mud
village and lurk within the simple but graceful mosque whose
architecture is more directly of the desert than that of any other
mosque in Africa. Its aloofness from the modern world is
absolute, and that in spite of the desecrating feet of infidels. It
is a whitewashed ruin into which the sands of the desert are
A Giant Palm Tree near Sidi Okba,
IL
I90 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
blown, and '* nothing so delights my heart as ruins in deserts, or
so repels it as ruins in the circle of fashion." We often talk of
finding within religious buildings the religious sentiment, but
the mosque breathes forth other than religious feeling — it is a
very mirror of the Arab mind, as well as of his faith. In it we
see the proud seclusion, the incorruptible simplicity of his views
of life, the horror of change ; and wherever an old mosque has
undergone restoration we may be sure it has ever been in the
spirit of preserving old forms, however shorn of their rich orna-
mentation, down to the minutest detail.
Certainly this traditional sameness has something terrible as
well as merely individual in it. All the interpretations of change
are familiar to us, but the voicelessness of monotony, the dead
stillness as though the breezes of life had fallen away, sometimes
as in this old building, these seem to suffocate the natural
restlessness within us. We realise that the Arab and his desert
home are unknown quantities for the average western mind.
How much we of the West know of desert life in its
psychological sense it would be hard to say, though the old
delusion that the Sahara was a dead sea, monotonous and still
impregnated with destructive salts, a sea of heavy sands, sterile,
unwatered, silhouetted here and there by caravans like trembling
waves upon the arid plain, threatened by storms more awful than
even those of the open ocean — a land, in fact, cursed by Nature
and dreaded by man — has evaporated like a very mirage of the
desert itself. No longer does it seem to us as only
" Du sable, puis du sable !
Le desert ! noir chaos
Toujours inepuisable
En monstres en fleaux !
Ici rien ne s'arrete,
Cesmonts ajaune crete,
Quand souffle la tempete
Roulent comme les flots I "
SANDS OF THE DESERT 191
As the ocean keeps its voice for the shore and its stillness
for the open sea,
" Gather a shell at the strewn beach
And listen at its lips. They sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole world's speech."
so on the borderlands of the oases the silence of the desert is
already half a song, and even the tourist from afar, worm though
he be, may listen to its echo if so he will. Perhaps, even, may
so feel its intoxication that penetrating into the solitudes of
sand, he will return with the words of the New World's lover of
Nature on his lips : " I swear to you that there are divine things
more beautiful than words can tell."
I have known several men who have fallen under the spell of
Arab life in Morocco, Egypt and Algeria, all men of very
different calibre of mind and whose several tastes and pursuits
had little or nothing in common. Yet in each case the influence
upon them has been the same. They all talk Arabic, they like
to sit over camp fires in the evening listening to Arab stories or
telling them ; their sympathy for the Arab character is so great
that they end by accepting largely the native view of life. Rest-
less, even dissatisfied in Europe, they always hunger after the
desert, a nostalgia for which clings to them no less than to the
Arab himself. *' La brise chaude, la brise d'Afrique, apportait
a mon cceur joyeux, I'odeur du desert ; I'odeur du grand continent
myst6rieux oh. Thomme du Nord ne p^nfetre gu^re. Depuis
trois mois, j'errais sur le bord de ce monde profond et inconnu,
sur le rivage de cette terre fantastique de I'autruche, du chameau,
de la gazelle, de Thippopotame, du gorille, de I'^l^phant et du
nhgre. J 'avals vu I'arabe galoper dans le vent, comme un drapeau
qui flotte et vole et passe, j 'avals couche sous la tente brune, dans
la demeure vagabonde de ces oiseaux blancs du deser J'etais ivre de
lumi^re, de fantaisie et d'espace." These are the words of one
192 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
to whom all that was mysterious in Nature and man appealed
with terrible force ; a brilliant mind that sought the mystery of
the incomprehensible till lost within its night.' What is then
the distinctive charm of this decayed civilisation of the desert
sands which to the average outsider far back into antiquity has
always contained so much that is repellent rather than sympathetic ?
There can be no doubt that in our day this charm exists, and that
the influence exercised upon the European is what might be
called of a disturbing nature, tending apparently to loosen the
European mind from its moorings, to imbue it with a certain
impalpable scepticism, and above all with a disinclination to pursue
any train of thought to its logical conclusion. Intellectual
lassitude is the mental heritage of the child of the desert, and de-
scends on all who have sojourned for long within the warm
shadow of Islam. Is there not a kind of mental hypnotism in
lands where all things are seemingly changeless, monotonous,
unicoloured, producing only what resembles the sand itself,
sand-hued gazelles, brown-skinned natives, camels invisible against
the arid dunes ; where the very palm-tops rise desperately towards
the sky as in a vain effort to see beyond the limitless expanses of
gold to find some new note in their solitude. Do those who
love the desert atmosphere love, without knowing it, its mental
lifelessness as well, during the long hours on the shores or the
seas of sand, hours without sadness or weariness, in a silence too
universal to be golden — hours lost but never regretted ?
Yet the very essence of character in man or Nature is trans-
formation and evolution, and Arab and desert alike are essentially
changeless. As change is the law of mental life, so also meta-
morphosis endless and varied is the law of Nature. Nothing re-
mains, everything is undergoing evolution. "Le temps passe,.
I'eau coule, et le coeur oublie." What is the change, then, that we
cannot see, but which must be working with infinite slowness
^ Guy de Maupassant.
ra,^."-- > .."- TT-aiRWifP^
SANDS OF THE DESERT 193
and paralysed forces within the psychology of the Arab and his
terrible home ? These are questions that come and go like
ghosts, unanswered, skirting the mental borderland of desert
wastes as we skirt the- shadow of palms and the perfume of
mimosa trees.
Within the shadow of palms surrounded with limpid artificial
pools, spreading about them the pacific culture of fields, on some
cool evening when against the red sky early bats are hallooing
about one, and perhaps the cry of a lone desert bird that wears
the ruff or the low croaking of frogs is heard, the desert that lies
beyond our green strip of clustered life seems to approach rather
than to disappear. Every pool of opalesque water becomes like
a mirror in which the sands of the desert lie drowned like
powdered gold. The water of the oasis is not like that of the
green earth, deny it who will. Water, like air, has atmosphere,
is sharply reflective or mysteriously clear. What life they have
— those palm-encircled pools in which long-limbed children splash
and the jars of the Soudanese women are plunged ! Even as I
gaze, one of the women straightens herself, balances her pitcher
with superb ease, and turns dark sodden eyes towards me as full
of mystery as her native mirror.
" Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human . . .
Why wag your head, with turban bound, yellow, red and green ?
Are the things so strange and marvellous you see or have seen."
Yes, they too, are like eyes, these pools of Biskra, reflecting
through the leaves of the symbolic palms the stars whose worship
once rose from the midst of the Arabian desert and which long
centuries have obliterated ; that Sabean adoration of stars, of
Canopus shining down over the desert with which the real spirit
of worship died away. There is exquisite life in them as they
sparkle on the edge of the parched sands undermined with
occult streams which, before the French had replaced with
2 B
194
IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
modern appliances the old primitive methods, rarely yielded
their waters save at the price of human life. What sacrificial
solemnity must have marked these desert scenes, the dark-
skinned, bare-limbed Arab, who, anointed and purified by prayer,
and with words of farewell upon his lips, was lowered amidst dead
silence into the depths of sand to grapple alone with the gurgling
:^-
In the Sahara.
forces of Nature. No more certain ''Open Sesame" than this —
the successful tapping of artesian wells, and well named are the
French Fountains of Peace.
But the evening falls and the shadow of the palms is cool and
calm. Fitting symbol is the lovely tree of the only struggle of
the desert, that struggle between life and death, not between
progress and decay. If the effort of survival has absorbed the
soul's existence, the palm remains the emblem of physical resist-
ance, growing faster, so it is said, when weighed down. Nay,
more than that, it is as the very emblem of all the races of Islam
and the lands they conquered, as it was to the ancient pagan the
CQ
SANDS OF THE DESERT 195
staff of life and the God of his region. See how the feathery-
shadows evaporate into the night, and the dusky red of the sky-
is lost within them. The camels with their evening loads have
passed by and all is still.
And now the ghosts of the desert steal out, though our eyes
cannot detect them. But the Arab sees and feels them around
him without fear. Indeed one might almost say that the desert
is a very- paradise for ghosts, the one spot on the earth's surface
where they may wander without inspiring fear. With a kind of
contempt the Arab will confess that they have worried him during
his evening wandering across the lonely stretches, that figures of
murdered men haunted his path, trying to lead him astray or to
assume the form of some familiar friend, but they were ghosts,
no notice did he take of them. He knows that, however
apparently lonely is the desert, life or the semblance of life
always shadows his own.
"Through the desert waste and wide,
Do I glide unespied,
As I ride, as I ride ? " —
*' No, never," says the Arab.
But however pierced with light the mystery of the desert has
become, the conception of its influence on the human mind has
had no need to change. I cannot help thinking that wherever in
the past a lack of sympathy was shown towards certain aspects of
Nature, it rose from the mental restrictions of the people inhabit-
ing them, which impressed painfully such types of mind as that
of the Greeks, who filled their mountains with terrible spirits, or
passed over the impressive silence of the Egyptian desert without
word or remark of any kind ; colonising only where the soil was
imaginative, close to the sea or in lonely plains, and seeking in
other lands not merely the shadow of their own landscape but the
echo of its responsive spirit as well. Are not the inward forces
196 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
of vast space and silence destructive to the higher flights of the
imagination ? The exaltation which certain minds feel in solitude
is, perhaps, never known in its highest sense save to those to
whom solitude itself is rare.
The influences of Nature might be broadly divided into two
categories — those of the sea and those not of the sea. Into this
last mountain and desert alike may be classed, earth's two sterner
because least variable aspects, and most distinct from her
harmonies. Into the category of the sea enters all restless life
that seeks voice, all that is full of vital longing, of profound
effort or transparent calm. Under its influence human genius is
stirred like the waves of the sea itself, its ambitions stimulated,
its poetic consciousness inspired. But mountain fastness or
desert plain teach other lessons, and eyes learn to see too
far, to miss blindly the nearer details of life as with the
sight of old age, and as with a voice crying, "grow old
along with me."
It is but of later days since the intellectual forces of the
world have become, so to speak, cosmopolitanised, and no longer
confined to certain areas, that the magnificence of mountain
scenery and its inspiration have ceased to inspire dread and
repulsion. Some radical change in our psychology has made of
them now speaking monuments of Nature's beauty, with lofty
messages to every poet ; but yet it is still rarely that we can say,
" The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam.
Were unto him companionship. They spake
A mutual language clearer than the tome
Of his own tongue."
The desert is nevertheless beginning after numberless
centuries to find a voice which can be heard through our busy
and noisy day — the eloquent voice of silence. We listen to it
with the same enjoyment as the perfume of a flower gives in a
SANDS OF THE DESERT 197
city room. The hum of forest pine-tops, the whisper of Psyche
in the ears of Dryads, the caves by the seashore as resonant of
sound as the tiny shells that strew the beach — these have soothed
men's hearts for ages past, but the silence of the desert is a new
medicine for new ills. Its qualities are medicinal rather than
inspiring and in spite of swarming tourist life which haunts
its confines and finds them beautiful, the desert still awaits
its intellectual significance, its epic poem. Does it wait in
vain ?
Whatever of profound avoidance we of other lands find in
the expression of desert scenery, it is no less remarkable that the
Arabs themselves, in spite of their native love of poesy, have
never analysed it in any way in their voluminous literature.
Only in the wording of their extravagant songs sung to the
beauty of their gardens, the Homeric magnificence of their tent
life, may be gathered the influence of contrast between oasis and
desert itself. Only the enjoyment of sport, the nostalgia of
separation, the mysterious contentment which desert life breathes
like opium into its atmosphere, is found in all their poetry of
religion, love, war, and horses, in which the Arab, seemingly
oblivious of the real conditions of existence even within the
oasis, represents the life there as a very paradise of exquisite
delights. Curiously enough Arab poetry has a certain affinity
to antique sculpture in its avoidance of all the realism of human
suffering ; but in their case it is an exaggeratedly deceptive
language, springing not only from artistic feeling but from much
the same insensibility to suffering and hardship which the Arab
displays physically. For in spite of smiling vegetation and
tranquil air during the lovely winter months, their garden of
Eden is more than half a mirage. The Saharan summer is far
too terrible to be passed over in silence. For seven out of the
year's months not a drop of rain falls from the feverish clouds
drifting over the whitened palm groves. There are even spots.
198 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
as in the vicinity of Touareg, where rain is said to fall but once
in ten years. The very pools of water stagnate and breathe
forth poison before which the nomad Arab and Berber, them-
selves as unfitted for sedentary life as water itself, would com-
pletely succumb were it not for the mingling of other and
warmer blood, the constant intermarriage with black races. In
no other country, indeed, does the blending of blood seem more
natural, for in Algeria what race has ever been absolutely pure ?
In this great cross road between the Soudan, Europe and the
East, race after race has circulated far back into antiquity, and
even to-day seven distinct elements overlap. Moors and
Berbers, the country's oldest inhabitants ; negroes, Turks, Jews,
and Koulouglis, though this last tribe restricts itself to the
smallest area ; and rare is it to find pure blood among any.
The Berber has absorbed into his genealogical veins the vitality
of all the rising and falling races of ancient times ; has been
classified under many names — Libian, Numidian, or Moor,
Persians, Medes and Armenians have overflowed into his
country, and now, half Arab, half who knows what, he still
exists by infusion rather than by native resistance. So with the
Arab ; so perhaps with all people of the desert who require
constantly renovated vitality to resist the elements of their
terrible home. This is the Paradise to which the poetry of the
desert turns with such flowery exaggeration, singing only to the
luxurious side of its existence, the laughing sport of the gazelle,
the delight in the wealth of cattle and sheep, the pride in the
Arab himself who owns it all, as in the following poem of half a
century ago, inspired by the temporary exile of an Arab chief
from his native oasis : —
(20) We divert ourselves with the pursuit of the soft-eyed gazelle, with
loaded and echoing gun ; sometimes we kill the chief of the herd.
Unload thyself of thy weapons, the slave is at thy side (to bear
them). Followers are at hand and watch over thy desires.
^,» /• »
The Palanquin of the Bash Aga, Biskra.
SANDS OF THE DESERT 199
(23) The day falls. With tightened reins and active spurs we quicken
our pace. The sweat of our steeds flows down to the very knees.
Our tribes are indicated by one whom we leave behind ; their
traces form a trail over the sand. The herds of cattle are grazing.
How shall I describe it? (They cover the earth) as a mist of
the shadow of clouds.
(26) Now the tent is pitched, the herds arrive, a pasturage is chosen for
the swift camels; they are accompanied by a band of dashing
horsemen. Now follow the litters borne by robust camels who
kneel before us.
(28) The interlaced flowers cover the plains with their designs. Cool
water in a wide basin refreshes the thirsty beasts.
(29) Whoe'er thou art that arrivest weary, thou shalt be tended with
affection ; milk shall be served thee, and chosen dates. Satisfy
thy hunger whilst the repast is preparing, the ribs roasting and
the sheep fattening. (Indicating that besides the sheep slain
many more remain to point to the host's wealth.)
(31) A couch of soft stuff^s, spread within the tent, offers thee its
warmth ; it is enriched with cushions and coverings which will
amaze thee.
(32) He who calumniates the Arabs, delights in lies; the words of the
envious are but calumnies ! The Arabs, without vanity, are the
adornment of the earth ; they are warriors whose resentment is
formidable ; always are they victorious.
(34) O Thou who art our intercessor, pure prophet, I solicit that our
birthplace may be protected by Thy favour. Wilt Thou dissipate
my sorrow and unite us — for I do but reclaim of Thee, Master,
Sovereign as Thou art, after my exile to be reunited as was Joseph
to his belongings ! '
So, when we would seek for what depths this inland solitude
has stirred within men's hearts, what part it has played in the
especial significance of Nature for man, and how it has helped to
' Composed forty years ago and famous among all Bedouins of Central
Maghrab. Trans, from " Chants Arabes,'^ Collection de Sonneck.
200 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
fashion him before the cosmopolitan spirit of our age had added
the sunrise and sunset across seas of sand to the world's list of
artistic joys, it is vain to turn to where we should instinctively
have done — not to the people but to the poetry of every age.
Did we turn to the poets who serve as intermediary between
the soul of a people and its expression, a silence, almost
unbroken, would answer us back — a silence like that of the
desert itself.
Is the death, then, of the desert mental as well as natural ?
This alone would make it terrible, however fair its borderlands,
its lovely oases of palms sprung from the residue of clay from
which Adam was formed, and bending exquisitely, *' like a
woman's head heavy with sleep." We turn to the Arab with
curious questioning, the Arab who wrung new life from his
sterile wastes, and who yet to-day is what he was yesterday.
Has he interpreted once and for all the most terrible force of
Nature, and in the herculean effort destroyed himself, since all
that rises from the desert falls back ere long into its engulfment ^
"These Arabs," says Carlyle, '*are a notable people. Their
country itself is notable, the fit habitation for such a race.
Savage, inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alter-
nating with beautiful strips of verdure ; wherever water is there
is greenness, beauty ; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date trees,
frankincense trees. Consider that wide, waste horizon of sand,
empty, silent, like a sand sea dividing habitable place from
habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the universe ;
by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance,
by night the great deep heaven with its stars. Such a country
is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men."
Hear too what Renan says of the Arab's native cradle :
" Dans ce monde anti-humain, pas un fruit, pas un grain de bl6,
pas une goutte d'eau. En revanche, nulle part ailleurs, la lumi^re
n'est aussi intense, I'air aussi transparent, la neige aussi eblouis-
m
SANDS OF THE DESERT 201
sante. Le silence de ces solitudes terrifie ; un mot prononc6 a voix
basse suscite des echos etranges. Le voyageur est trouble du
bruit de ses pas. C'est bien la montagne des Elohim, avec leurs
contours invisibles, leurs decevantes transparences, leurs bizarres
miroitements."
It has always seemed to me that quite apart from the religious
awakening of Islam, one of the most interesting features of
Moorish greatness is that it was pushed into existence by a
desert struggle, and that for centuries this struggle conquered the
influence of the desert itself, which had always had so pronounced
a depression on mental progress. That the great desert should
speak at all and find language sufficiently strong to grapple with
the enveloping silence belongs to the mysterious side of the work-
ings of Nature. With the Arabs of the invasion it was the
struggle between the confines of one desert and the confines
of another, a civil warfare which ignited inner, not outer, fires.
The illusion of breaking into it with the roar of western nations,
filling it with the voices of foreign races, has ever been a mere
Utopia, as in the days of the Romans, who battled with its sands
and were buried beneath them.
The effect of foreign races on desert life reminds one of the
effect of the desert influence in Spain. Without being kaleido-
scopic, Spain has ever been absorbent of vast impressions which
have sunk in from without, like heavy dews, and it is not mere
suggestion that that country loses half its language when the far-
off note of the desert is unknown ; so as one thought leads into
another, the desert as an abstract influence in Spain strikes
forcibly those who have passed directly from the peninsula to
the verge of the sand sea. The terrible effect of solitude on the
psychology of the Arabs is naturally powerful, but that its hidden
force should have penetrated into that far-off country of Europe,
that many of its strange characteristics should still be found in
people and scenery alike, takes the imagination, as it were, by
202 IN THE TRACK OF THE MOORS
storm. It fills one, too, with a curious sense of aloofness from
Spanish landscape, a feeling at once of attraction and repulsion,
such as steals over the mind even in the confines of the desert
itself — we hardly know why. There is certainly something curiously
complete in a journey through Spain and along the northern
coasts of Africa ; it inscribes a sort of semicircle on the map like
an old cuneiform character marking the inscription of splendid
centuries.
INDEX
Abd-el-Kadir, description of, 159
Alcazar, Seville, 20, 28, 29, 74, 79-82
Algeciras, 121
Algeria, 149-165
Algeria as French military school, 161,
162
Algiers, 150-152
Alhambra, the, 39-48, 102, 127
Andalusia, 19
Arabesque and azulejo work, 89-103
Arab MSS. burnt at Granada, 29
poem, translation of, 198, 199
■ simile regarding religious diverg-
encies, 130
weaving, 93, 95, 96
Archeveche of Algiers, 69, 99, loi
Arenal, Dona Concep9ion, io6
Ballad of the fifteenth century, 1 2
Barres, Maurice, 19
Bazan, Madame Emilia Pardo, 106, 107
Bazars of Tunis, 1 70
Beatrice of Galindo, 116
Berbers and their influence, 45, 90, loi,
129, 130, 163-165
Bey Ahmed, 157
Biskra, 185-190
, street scenes in, 186-188
Camoens, 1 40
Carlyle's description of Arabs, 200
Carthage, 181- 183
Casa de Mesa, Moorish lettering on, 17
Cervantes, 8, 9, 22
Ceuta, 121, 139
Child guides, 16, 17
Cloisters de los Reyes, 16
Coffee, excessive use of by Arabs, 150,
Constantine, French assault on, 156-
Convent life in Spain, 105, 118-120
Colonisation, distinction between English
and French, 154
Cordova, 20, 112, 113
and Seville, contrast between, 20
Coronela, Maria, the nun, 114, 115
Cosmopolitan character of Algiers, 151,
152
Desert life, influence of, 191-202
, the sands of, 185-202
Don Juan, 34-36
El Islam, influence of, 1 21-136
Englishman and Sevillian chemist,
anecdote of, 33, 34
"Fall of Granada," 38
Fez, i43-i45> 172
Flamanco element in Seville, 26
Fortuny, 22, 83, 98
French colonisation in Northern Africa,
French Imperial officers in Algeria,
character of, 159, 160
French in Morocco, 143
Generalife, the, of Granada, 82-85,
87, 88
the, Navagero's description of, 84,
85
Gipsies, 25, 26, 52, 53, 187
Goya, 8, 22
Granada, 37-53> ^^h H7
Hall of Justice in the Alhambra, paint-
ings in, 47-49
Horse, the Arab, 41
Hospital de la Caridad, 34
Hypnotism, gipsies adepts in, 187
Influence of Algerian training on
Franco-German War, 162
203
204
INDEX
Islam the fountain head of Moorish
history in Spain, 130
Italians in Tunisia, 176-178
Jews and their influence, 45, 151, 152
Kabyle jewellery, 164, 165
Kabyles, 163-165
Kairowan, 172, 174
Keynote to Moorish and Andalusian
character, 7
Khalif Usman and Mohamed's writings,
136
Koran, the, 48, 49, 61, 94, 95, 125, 129,
136
Maze in garden of Alcazar, 8t
Mohamed, 49, 62, 127, 131-136
Mohamedans, estimated number of, 126
Moorish architecture, origins of, in Spain,
55-72
gardens of Spain, 73-88
influence in Andalusia, 29, 30
passion for adornment, 46
style of arch, 70
Moriscos, 5
Morocco, 137-148
Mosaic work, 97
Mosque of Cordova, 57-59
, the primitive, 66
Murcia, 24
Murillo, 9, 21
Nail decoration, 102
Navagero's description of the Generalife,
84, 85
Oil mills and vintages dying out, 30
Old prophecy fulfilled at Constantino,
Olives in Spain, 30, 31
Pelissier, Marshal, brutality of, 160
" Pere Bugeaud," 160
Procrastination, Spanish, 5, 6
Puerta del Sol, Toledo, 13
Visagra, Toledo, 13
RoNDA, 23
Rusinol, 9, 22, 73
Ruskin's summing up of the mediaeval
spirit, 146, 147
Seville, 22, 23, 26-36
Sidi Okba, Mosque of, 66, 102, 189
Smoking, reply to suppliant's question
regarding, i 28
Soudanese women, 193
Spain, first look at from railway, 9
, impressions of, 1-18
Spanish bookseller, the, 107
character, 2-9
pride, 16
women and their traditions, 105
Summer in the Sahara, 197, 198
Taine, 1-3
Tangiers, 138- 141
Tarik, 12J
Tattooing of Kabyle women, 165
Tiles in the Alcazar, 98
introduced into Spain by Arabs,
97
used for decoration, 97, 99
Toledo, 10-18
, Cathedral of, 18
Tribal feud, 133
Tunis, 167-172
Tunisia, 167-183
Valdes Leal's painting, 34, 35
Valencia, 22, 103
Valliere, Mdlle. de la. Sultan of
Morocco requests hand of, 143
Velasquez, 8, 9, 21, 146
Water in Moorish gardens, y6, 77, 7 g
Worship of the Virgin, 1 24
Ximenez, Archbishop of Toledo, 29
Colston b' Coy. Limited, Printers, Kdinburgh.
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