Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  But these details, good though they are, do not convey Orihuela, the way it stands under the mountains on its quiet river, the old Moorish towers and domes and flat-roofed houses among their palms, rising sheer above the shining water which holds their rippling images, the vine trellises and tall earthen pots on the terraces, the brooding heat of the ancient oriental town in its afternoon sleep. They make pots in Orihuela; but when I was there no one seemed to be making anything; the Orihuelans sat at their doors in the shade of the deep streets and stared in amaze at the foreigner and her car.

  I left Orihuela in the late afternoon, and drove south-west along the dusty road, through the huerta of Murcia, the low sun like a blinding fire in my eyes. Around the road a great garden land lay, rich with grain and fruit trees, tomatoes, carobs, pumpkins, great melons, rustling canes, with palms spreading delicate fingers above them and little vines crawling on the ground. It was fifteen miles to Murcia city; the old kingdom of Murcia I entered a few miles beyond Orihuela, the last town of Valencia.

  Chapter Three

  Murcian Shore

  Crossing from the kingdom of Valencia into that of Murcia, I remembered the learned, prejudiced and passionate Richard Ford’s description of the Murcians of a century ago; how he had condemned this region, ‘lying in an out of the way corner,’ as ‘the Boetia of the south,’ where

  Murtia, the pagan goddess of apathy and ignorance, rules undisturbed and undisputed. Dullness o’er all usurps her ancient reign. The better classes vegetate in a monotonous unsocial existence; their pursuits are the cigar and the siesta. Few men in any wise illustrious have ever been produced by this Dunciad province. The lower classes are alternately sluggish and industrious. Their physiognomy is African, and many have emigrated latterly to Algeria. They are superstitious, litigious and revengeful.

  Up in the mountains, ‘the side ways are studded with crosses, erected over sites where wine and women have led to murder.’

  I do not know how Ford knew all this scandal, but he had a great appetite for it. So it was with some apprehension that I drove into and through that golden and westering land, the setting sun in my eyes, the spires and towers of the capital rising against an orange sky. Murcia lies in the fertile basin of the Segura, that oasis in a desert, transformed into a garden by Moorish irrigation; round it spreads a parched, tawny wilderness of sun-scorched plain and wild, barren mountains.

  Murcia is a large town; larger than Cartagena, Granada or Cadiz, though not so large as Seville or Valencia. But, though no longer walled, it has a compact look, owing to being of a circular shape and lying in a plain girdled and guarded by mountains. Though there are plenty of modern streets and buildings, particularly round the Arenal, with its smart paseos, gardens and hotels, and on the south side of the river, which has unattractive alamedas, public gardens and plazas named after royalty and Floridablanca, in spite of all this, Murcia has, by not destroying too many of its old buildings, avoided an air of aggressive modernity; and it still looks partly African (beneath its baroque), as befits a city that first rose to importance at the beginning of the Moorish occupation. Some of its patriots say that it became important under the Visigoths, from being a small and obscure Roman town (there are Roman remains in it), others that the Visigoths let it down, if they did not actually destroy it. Anyhow, Murcia took kindly to the Moors, who made it an independent kingdom, and its capital a, town of importance. It rebelled against the Christian conquest, though now there are, it is said, no more devout and ritualistic Christians in Spain.

  Murcia is deliciously full of baroque; no wonder Ford found it dull. All he can say of Francisco Zarcillo, who did much of the sculpture, is that had he lived in a better age he might have done good work. But there are really few dull moments in Murcia. When I entered it the golden evening lay on it ripely, as on a garden of bright fruit; for many of the houses are painted gay, trees and gardens grow about them, blue grape domes bloom above them, and the river runs between. The Gothic cathedral’s Churriguerresque façade in golden stone, by Jaime Bort, is very rich and pleasing, and has an animated figure in every Corinthian columned and fluted recess; bishops, saints and angels stand with elegant firmness in niches and on pediments, or balance with charming precariousness on curved whorls, all pyramiding up to the arched summit, where, above the Assumption in an apse, voluminously garbed angels support a shield. The evening sunshine blazing on this ornately beautiful scene made it appear the golden gate of some urbane and cheerful paradise. There was a service proceeding inside, which floated out with the utmost sweetness and accomplishment. The tall, domed belfry tower is very elegant, though built in several different styles. The richly carved Renaissance octagonal chapel of the Marqués de los Vélez, sculptured with armorial shields and manueline-like chains, projects from the south-east corner. All the cathedral portals are rich and good. Inside, darkness and benediction combined to hinder complete observation, and I did not explore the many chapels, not even the plateresque Vélez, or the Sacristía Mayor, which has a lovely door.

  Across the plaza is the Palacio Episcopal, one of the most attractive of baroque palaces, with its fine doors and tiled dome like a pigeon’s breast; from its south front one looks across a tree-shaded paseo to the river and beyond it. I walked about the town. There are about a dozen churches in it and several colegios and disused convents. Many have charming façades, towers, azulejos and domes. More attractive still are many of the details, carved doors and windows and wrought iron balconies, and armorial shields that decorate the hidalgos’ houses and small palaces scattered about the streets between the baroque churches with their dove’s breast tiled domes. In the Calle del Principe Alfonso (the old Calle de la Traperia) among the shops and cafes are Renaissance windows and doors, with sculptured pillars and lintels, their iron balconies making delicate shadows on the white or coloured walls. In another street doric columns twist up on either side of a door to a carved lintel which supports the tall slim pillars of a narrow window; on the corner of this house heraldic creatures hold a shield. There is the Casa Huerta de la Bombas, where beneath the balustrade that runs along the terraced roof, a rich escutcheon bearing a royal crown is guarded by two rampant beasts and two shaggy wild men standing above twisted pillars. The palace of the Marqués de Almodovar has, to guard its tall carved window, two naked warriors with clubs; between them a little balcony is bright with flowers in pots. These hidalgo façades, of all periods, late Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, are everywhere among the more modern houses with their awnings down against the sun. In a quiet, pretty plaza, near the church of Santa Catalina, is the solid seventeenth-century house of the Contraste, carved with coats-of-arms and wreaths, with a fine square door; round it are old balconied houses and market stalls. There are charming patios, and plazas planted with oranges and palms, and no street in the older part of the town is dull. Its inhabitants may be so; I did not see enough of them to find out, though they seemed cheerful and sociable enough. Certainly the portraits of the Murcian worthies in the Cronica de Murcia have not a very lively air - San Fulgencio, for example, looks a bishop rather earnest than animated; the Count of Floridablanca, who expelled the Jesuits under Charles III and, as a citizen of Murcia, had a public garden named after him, wears a worried look (but this may be the result of expelling Jesuits; even Pombal in his later life had a touch of it); Don Diego Saavedra Fajardo, a seventeenth-century representative of this noble Murcian family, looks, though plump, also apprehensive; the Marqués de Corvera (mid-nineteenth century) frowns, his mind on railways and public works. It is true that few Murcians have been great creative artists; true also that the province suffered intellectually, as well as financially and agriculturally, from the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, and has never, so they say, been the same since.

  All the same, when I went out into the town next morning, after a night somewhat broken by bells, Murcia seemed sufficiently animated, and the market by the river quays was a lively scene. I visited the cathedral again, which
was, for some reason, open, and saw the fine riot of plateresque ornament, and the chapels and carved sacristy, and the urn containing portions of Alfonso el Sabio, and other vessels with ashes of saints. The French, as usual, looted the cathedral and city of everything of value on which they could lay hands; until one day, when General Soult was feasting in the Bishop’s Palace, the Murcians turned on their oppressors, and Soult ‘rose panic-stricken from the table and fled, committing atrocities which cannot be related,’ for the French army in the Peninsula, as reported by their foes, committed atrocities even at the least likely moments. Fortunately the French army did not care for the pretty little coloured wooden statue of St. Anthony in Capuchin habit carved by Alonso Cano, which is, therefore, still on the altar of the church of San Nicolas.

  It was very hot on the morning I left Murcia. The dust-filmed landscape shimmered and danced, the distant hills were colourless. My road ran whitely through the plain, crossed a mountain ridge, then the plain again; thirty miles of dullish country, animated by fantastic, airy Murcian windmills, and then there was Cartagena and the sea.

  No one, since it was the pride, glory, wealth and commercial capital first of the Massian Iberians, then of Carthaginian, then of Roman Spain, has seemed to care much for Cartagena. I did not care much for it myself; it is too large, too noisy, too modernized and industrialized. Yet it is magnificently set on its steep hill above the finest harbour in Spain; the mountains jut round it to east and west, as Polybius describes; the island of Hercules (now Escombrera) lies at the harbour’s mouth and so shuts it in that the gulf is always smooth except when the wind beats it into foam. It would hold a large fleet; and, indeed, often has. The town has long since lost its walls and gates, those walls first built by the Iberians with huge cyclopean stones, rebuilt by the Carthaginians when they turned the Massian stronghold into Carthago Nova, kept up by the Roman and all successive conquerors, until the nineteenth-century devallation mania pulled them down at the beginning of this century. The city, however, is still guarded by castles and forts. Its streets climb steeply up the hill behind it. But it is not what it was two thousand years ago, when Strabo wrote:

  New Carthage is by far the most powerful of all the cities in this country, for it is adorned by secure fortifications, by walls handsomely built, by harbours, by a lake, and by the silver mines of which I have spoken. And the fish-salting industry is large. Furthermore, New Carthage is a rather important emporium, of imports from the sea for the inhabitants of the interior, and exports from the interior for all the outside world.

  Yes, New Carthage was a place then. And two centuries before that, when Scipio so cleverly captured it from the Carthaginians. It is not easy to follow closely Polybius’s account of this exploit, for the landscape has changed, and the ebbing lagoon that Scipio’s army ran across has now ebbed quite away, and New Carthage is no longer on an isthmus. But the clash and echo of the siege, of the scaling of the walls, the shouting and the slaughter and the Carthaginian rout, still tremble on the hot air, and the great harbour seems full of Roman galleys. Carthago Nova, the great Punic stronghold, so proudly later to become Colonia Victrix Julia Nova Kartago, is dwindled from her one-time grandeur, but is still a large and busy arsenal and port. A melancholy place many visitors have found it; Gautier complained that it was mournful, shut in by barren rocks, the houses having a prison-like air, reminiscent of Castile, the windows all grilled. Henry Swinburne, in 1775, complained of cruelty to the galley slaves who worked in the docks till they dropped dead with exhaustion. I myself noticed none of these disadvantages. I admired the harbour and the ships; I thought of the elephants of Carthage trumpeting up and down the steep streets, of the silver mines, which have dazzled and enriched the cupidinous world down the ringing, clinking centuries, the mines where kings and merchants have looted wealth to build cities, navies, palaces and empires, where slaves have toiled and died. I thought of the barbarians (Vandals in the fifth century, Goths in the seventh, Sir Francis Drake in the sixteenth), who had sacked and burnt this wealthy city, but it was always rebuilt. I remembered how the Roman governors had liked to winter here, alternating with Tarraco, a far better place. I looked in vain for a bathing beach, thought it would be very pleasant to take a boat out to Escombrera, did not really explore the town or look for the remains of the Temple of Asclepius or of the palace of Hasdrubal, or visit the one-time cathedral (said to be no good) or climb Castle Hill to get a view of Scipio’s ford across the lagoon, or journey out to see the silver mines. I felt depressed by the noisy streets; probably when the Romans wintered there they were noisier still. I found my way, with some difficulty, to the Vice-Consulate of my country, and called there for letters. The Vice-Consul, who knew all about Cartagena and all about the roads round it, told me it was practically impossible to go by the coast road to Almeria, it was too bad, and that between Almeria and Motril it was blocked by road works; the best way to Granada was by Lorca and the inland mountain road. As I wanted to see Lorca, this seemed a good plan. I was sorry not to see also the gulf of Almeria, but I remembered how Avienus had said of this gulf in illis oris ignobilia sunt oppida,’ and that between the Cabo de Gata and Malaga there had been once many towns and a multitude of Phoenicians living there, but that now, in his time, it was uncultivated desert sand. It might have revived a little since Avienus wrote, but Murray said that the houses were small and the women and climate African (he does not say if the men were more European), and I knew Lorca and Guadix and the Granada mountains to be good.

  There is no bathing in Cartagena, said the British Vice-Consul. Once, yes; in the last century it was a bathing resort of its hated rival Murcia (hated because Murcia was given by Pope Nicholas IV Cartagena’s ancient episcopal see), and families migrated there in the summer from the interior. But now, in all that beautiful almost enclosed gulf, there is no bathing. Murcia has constructed for itself swimming pools, and goes for weekends to the shores of the Mar Menor, which must be a wonderful bathing lake, almost land-locked behind the two long mountain arms that encircle it, and strewn with enchanting islands, but, it is said, shallow and warm.

  The Vice-Consul said that in Lorca one stayed at the Comercio, a seventeenth-century inn, and that in the mountains between Guadix and Granada it was wiser not to drive after dark, as they were infested by a predatory maquis, who held up travellers and cars by night, to show their disapproval of the present government. He sent his chauffeur out with me to show me the Lorca road; the chauffeur and I drank caféhelado outside a plaza cafe, and I started for Lorca, along a road that ran through a blasted heath, smothering in dust all vehicles that disturbed it. I drove for some way behind a Lorca-Cartagena diligence, which was veiled in a white, whirling cloud. Dust flung itself through my windows, through every interstice in the car’s frame, lying whitely on seats and cushions and luggage, drifting into the boot and seeping into my picnic basket. Each day the car became so coated with this deposit of the roads of Spain that, whenever I paused in a town, little boys wrote their names on it. But the cross-country road that ran by Fuente Alamo to the main MurciaLorca road was, I think, the dustiest that I met in Spain. After thirty-five miles it reached the main road, that ran south-west to Lorca, a line of mountains on its right. In sight of these mountains I stopped and lunched; I had bread, cheese, and a melon inside which I had put figs, grapes and peaches, to keep them cool. The water in my water-pot was deliciously cold.

  Lorca, pale and dusty, burned luminously on its hill in the August afternoon sun. It is an infinitely agreeable town. Though it is Roman and Moorish, and has a Moorish name and a partly Moorish castle, it has the air of belonging almost wholly to the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; nothing in it, anyhow, looks new. Almost every street has charming baroque or Renaissance doorways, coats-of-arms, terraced houses. I got a room in the Comercio, the seventeenth-century inn. Opposite it was the richly carved two-storied Churriguerresque doorway of a seignorial house, with pale, twisted, foliated columns, sportive figure
s and dignified birds, and, above, a richly sculptured coat-of-arms. On either side of the door iron window-balconies festooned with flowering shrubs cast light shadows on the terracotta walls. It was a very beautiful house-front. Round the corner was the church of Rosario. In front of my bedroom window was an old house with a flat terrace; on it aloes grew, in deep blue pots, and vines trellised above it.

  The Comercio is cool and open, built in a circle round a stone stairway - very pleasant. The proprietor too was pleasant. He was interested in my car; he said he had heard that women in England drove cars, and did many other things that, in Spain, were done exclusively by men. He knew about English doings, for he had listened to the B.B.C. during the war. But I must not be surprised, he told me, if Spaniards, who saw few foreigners, were astonished at seeing me at the wheel. I had, I told him, long ceased to be surprised at that: their astonishment, whether I was at the wheel or on foot, had pursued me all down Spain.

  I wandered about the enchanting town after dusk. In the hot, steep narrow streets people strolled and sat, children played, lights gleamed out of open windows and from the stalls on the pavements that sold fruit and combs and pots. Lorca was very gay in the night. Ford called it a dull, unsocial place, and Henry Swinburne ‘saw nothing in it to make a note of but the dress of a gypsy, the daughter of the innkeeper.’ How sartorially minded, what costumiers, tourists used to be! To spare a glance for the dress of a gypsy (or, indeed, of anyone else) when surrounded by the seventeenth-century loveliness and elegance of Lorca, argues an interest in clothes and human creatures almost morbid; perhaps they caught it from the Spanish. For Lorca is truly lovely, with the rare, blanched pastel beauty of a Wedgwood vase. I was out in it early next morning, before it grew hot, when the pale early sunshine bathed the Plaza de España (for so it seemed to be called, though all the books call it the Plaza Mayor; perhaps the new name is part of the nationalist movement; it was a relief to find no Plaza Generalisimo Franco). High above this lovely plaza, which has white stone benches round it, and trees, and in the middle a flower garden with a fountain, stands the Colegiata de San Patricio, at the top of a steep flight of steps; it has two baroque doors, and in the arms of the statues of saints and bishops on the parapet live pigeons nestle and coo. Along one side of the plaza are Renaissance and baroque houses, with balconies and sculptured porches and, windows, about which the pigeons rustle and coo and drop; across the other side is the baroque Ayuntamiento.