Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Walking back to the Comercio down the steep pale streets, past carved gateways and balconies heaped with cucumbers, I came to the market, in a circle of arcades round a flowering garden; it had possibly once been the cloister of a convent. Vegetables and fruit and cheese, bread and meat, rope shoes, esparto baskets and brooms, dates and raisins, were being sold, in a babel of chatter and chaffering. I do not know if Richard Ford had been to the mercado when he called Lorca a dull unsocial place.

  The streets were alive with little donkeys slung with panniers; some were collecting the dust, which seemed a good plan; others had their panniers full of water pots, and were ridden by pretty little boys (never little girls).

  I returned to the Comercio for coffee, and went out again to see more Churriguerresque churches. Lorca was once full of convents; I do not know how many are left of these.

  I drove out of seventeenth-century Spain into the Spain of the Moors - a menacing landscape, a heave of burnt hills, quite dry and bare. If the maquis were lurking about these mountains, there seemed little cover for them. Nothing, once the green vale of Lorca with its fruity huerta was past, except cactus, aloes, prickly pears, tawny rocks, and pale, clay-coloured villages built, one house on another, into the sides of the hills. There was an occasional peasant’s house, surrounded by a few olives and figs and beehive-shaped ricks of straw. The desolate road was shadowless and treeless, choked with dust, scorched with sun; the shade temperature was 102. Nothing travelled on the road but flocks of little brown goats and an occasional donkey, its cart or panniers piled high with branches or grass, ridden or driven by a beautiful brown child, or by a turbaned, classically featured brown Moor. These are a very handsome people. Murcia, which I was about to leave, is a most delightful province.

  Chapter Four

  And Alucian Shore

  The milestone, which said ‘Provincia de Almeria’ on its thither side and ‘Provincia de Murcia’ on its hither, was exciting, for Almeria is the first province in the great realm of Andalucia, which stretches from Murcia down the Mediterranean, past the Straits, and down the Atlantic to Portugal: Andaluz, ‘the land of the west,’ the land of Tartessos, of the Hesperides, of the exploits of the Homeric heroes, of the Phoenician settlements, of the first Greek colonies, of the great Arab culture, of the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain. One does not enter Andalucia without a leaping of the blood.

  The frontier is within a few miles of Velez Rubio, a town on a gentle hill, on which most guidebooks are silent because the railway does not run that way, and guidebook writers find it troublesome to leave trains. It is a steep-streeted town, climbing up to a castle and surrounded by hills; it has some charming plazas, a Casa Consistorial, three fountains round the walls, a number of one-time convents, a good baroque parroquial of 1753 (the old one having been destroyed by earthquake in 1751). The stone portal is very nice, with columns and statues and cornices and a gilded cross supported by angels, and above the door the arms of the house of Velez. It has two high towers, with beautiful capitals, surrounded by galleries from which, were one up in them, one would see a superb view. I neither went inside the church (which was, of course, shut) nor up the towers. Velez Rubio is a very attractive place, which gains in romance, no doubt, from being the first Andalucian town one comes to from Murcia. From it the road ran desolately on through the burnt, cactus-sharp, breathless sprawl of hills. Noon blazed down on road and moorland; not an olive tree gave shade for rest and lunch. Ochre villages burrowed into hill-sides, hovel piled on hovel, backed by steep rock. The road entered the province of Granada. In a steep ravine straggled Cullar de Baza; a few miles on was Baza, a primitive Iberian town, later the Roman Basti, an early bishopric, then an important stronghold of the Moors, from whom it was won at last by Isabella of Castile after a long siege. The town and its surrounding vineyards (famous for their good wine) are rich in Roman and Iberian fragments: there is much about it in that fascinating work Antigüedades prehistoricas de Andalucía. Baza is splendidly built in the Moorish style on the eastern slope of a hill; its narrow streets wind and climb round close-built houses and ruined Moorish castle in a fine huddle; its Gothic collegiate church stands on the site of the Visigothic cathedral of the ancient see, of the Moorish mosque that replaced this, and the Christian church consecrated after the conquest. Immediately round Baza lies a fruitful garden of vines, olives and grain, watered by a confluence of rivers; above this fertile basin rises the conical hill Javalcón, full of burrowing cave-dwellers.

  The road wound on through bare, barren hills of tufa rock and esparto grass, honeycombed with caves and grotesque with odd pinnacles - a wild African scene. Suddenly it changed: an avenue of mulberry trees swept towards a graceful city; at the end of the avenue a golden-brown cathedral rose on a height above a flight of steps; it was Guadix. The Churriguerresque façade, as one approached it along the avenue, had a more than earthly loveliness in the golden afternoon light, standing high above a wall, looking over that strange tormented country. This was Wadi-Ash, a city of the Moors; Acci, Guadix el Viejo, the ancient Iberian, Roman and Visigothic city, lies four or five miles from it (but I could not locate it). Acci was important under the Empire - Colonia Julia Gemela, station of veterans of the first and second legions; it early became a bishop’s see, which continued under the first Arab centuries. When the see was put down, and when Acci was destroyed and Guadix built, no one but the Moors can tell us, and they have probably forgotten. Guadix was a Moorish city of importance; it had a mosque, on whose site the Christian site was later built. Moorish-Christian battles raged about it for three centuries; it was not finally conquered by the Catholic Kings until 1489. Dominating the city on the height above it stands the ruined Moorish fortress. The cathedral, built on the site of the earlier church, was built from 1710 to 1796; in front of it runs a broad paseo, from which one passes, by steep narrow streets, into the town. The town is delightful, winding and steep; every other shop seems to sell earthen pots and crocks. While I drank coffee, the whole of the younger population of Guadix mobbed my car; they were shooed away by a very kind man, who stood on the running-board and guided me to the best pot shop; we were pursued by the delighted children, who crowded into the shop after me while I bought a white water pot, a china fruit dish, and a row of china boxes to hold salt and pepper. They followed me also when I went to the Plaza Mayor, a charming columned market square; they were truly anxious to assist and guide me to the enjoyments of their pleasant city. It was with some difficulty that I got away, out into the extraordinary, uncanny Barrio de Santiago and all the surrounding country of tawny hills and caves. For this was the cave country of the Sierra of Guadix, and all about there were doors and chimneys in the cliffs, and behind the doors (sometimes painted blue) lived the cave dwellers. It was like a child’s picture book of gnomes’ houses, fantastically improbable and unreal.

  The road twisted up into the Granada mountains; its zigzags sharpened. Great sierras formed the rim of a huge basin against the sultry sky; their shadows lay, in lovely pastel shades, across the evening light. On my left towered the Sierra Nevada, magenta and indigo and topped with snow. The road curled between high cliffs, steep, precipitous rocks and jags; the bends were as sharp as those on the San Felíu-Tossa road. It would not be a road to travel after dark. These were the mountains of the Granada maquis against whom I had been warned; the descendants, I suppose, of the ancient banditti, Iberian, Saracen and Christian, who had always haunted this sinister country. But I met no maquis; or, if maquis they were, these occasional goat-herds and donkey riders, they wore an innocent and friendly air.

  The road twisted down from the mountains, and suddenly beneath its heights Granada spread, bosomed in its wide, high plain, climbing over its three hills, towered and valleyed, delicately shadowed in the evening light, guarded by the cold lilac peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Few landmarks were distinguishable, except the steep wooded hill of the Alhambra and the Generalife, and the broad gulf of the Darro cutting through the ci
ty. I drove down into the town. One should, of course, have found a room in one of the hotels or pensions close to the Alhambra or Generalife, such as the famous Siete Suelos; but those I tried were either expensive or full, and it seemed easier to find a hotel in the city. The happy days of a century ago, when Washington Irving, Richard Ford, Gautier, and apparently anyone else who chose, could camp undisturbed in any rooms of the Alhambra or of Charles V’s palace that they liked to select, are long since over. It is a tantalizing exercise to decide which apartments one would have chosen. Washington Irving had a whole suite, and changed them when he liked. The Alhambra, for so long neglected, plundered, desecrated, turned into stables for donkeys and lodgings for gypsies, criminals and tourists, has for many years now been tidied up and made into a show place, admission so many pesetas, guide so many more. The Spanish, who for so long treated their unrivalled treasure with indifferent neglect, were at last stimulated by foreign visitors into making it a national monument; it is less picturesque than in Washington Irving’s day, but better kept.

  Nothing can spoil the Alhambra and the Generalife. Neglected, despoiled and partly destroyed in order to build the lumpish palace of Charles V, its pavements torn up, its arches blocked, its exquisite traceries smashed and mutilated, its treasures, its rich marbles, looted and removed by the French invaders, its towers mined and blown up when these vandals fled in 1812, the mosaic floors broken and planted with shrubs and later replaced with modern tiles, donkeys, sheep, cattle, tramps, prisoners, criminals, vagabonds and maniacs defiling for years its lovely courts and corridors, foreign tourists eating and sleeping (and doubtless plundering) for months in the rooms built so delicately for Arab pleasures and tastes-all these disasters, depredations and vandalisms make one, reading the tale of them, wonder what can be left; and, on the top of destruction, a century of restoration and reconstruction, fake tiling, mosaic and stucco work, seems to complete the ruin of this unique monument to a past civilization. Yet, when one sees it, it remains startling in its beauty and in its impact on the imagination. Here is an Arabian Nights’ palace. Here are the Arab centuries delicately carved in stone, in marble in plaster, in wood, and delicately gushing in fountains and streams. There is no need (unless you are interested and armed with copious books of information) to be curious in inquiry as to which parts of the work are Arab of the fourteenth century, which Spanish of the nineteenth and twentieth; the whole effect is enchanting, and not even its tourist air, the memory of a hundred imitations, its resemblance to the over-fastuous caskets sold in Granada shops, or the tiresome gypsies at the park gates, can spoil it. The magnificent acropolis, encircled by its adobe, burnt sienna walls and towers, set with palaces, fortresses, arches and deep green gardens, rises above the city, beautiful but uninteresting woods full of the Duke of Wellington’s imported nightingales climbing up its slope. From its heights one sees old and new Granada lying, with its sunburnt vega stretching hazily beyond it to the cold blue limpid mountains (the Moors would never have let the vega get so burnt). Through the Charles V Puerta de las Granadas you enter the Alameda, and follow it up through the cool woods to the Puerta Judiciaria, that square, solid, orange-coloured gate tower, with the Karoli Quinto fountain, and so to the Alhambra palace, passing from one lovely hall and patio after another, each a delicate fantasy of fastuous traceries, old, restored and new, graceful arcades, slender shafts, cupolas, horseshoe arches, coloured azulejos (mostly new), and richly worked plaster ornament (largely new), with religious slogans inscribed among the decoration. The mixture of the original Maghribian architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the Gothic of the Spanish kings, the Mudéjar decorators whom they employed in the sixteenth century, and the nineteenth and twentieth-century restorations, makes an effect insidiously and sensuously charming, continually spurious and unrooted, but exquisite. The actual architecture of rooms and patios is superb and little spoilt - the Court of the Myrtles, for instance, with its long, narrow, jade green water tank, terminal vaulted alcoves, nineteenth-century tiled floor, and slender columns, richly capitaled and once brilliantly coloured by the Moors, as Greek temples were by the Greeks. The tank used to be surrounded by a Moorish balustrade, broken down and sold by marauders, who also stripped the azulejos dado, at the end of the eighteenth century. Against one end of the patio Charles V piled his ungainly palace, destroying the Moorish entrance and a number of lovely rooms, which were possibly for the use of the harem. Above the arcaded passage at the other end towers the square red-brown battlemented Torre de Comares, one of the piquant incongruities in which the Alhambra abounds. Between the two lies the unspoilt, though so often despoiled, loveliness of the arcaded marble myrtles court and its long blue-green water so suavely holding the summer sky and slender white colonnades in its cool smoothness.

  One enters Charles V’s palace armed with the disgust that such a piece of outrageous vandalism deserves. But in itself this massive example of Italian Renaissance classicism is, in its own pompous way, not unadmirable. Its colour is a pleasant warm golden; it has a fine circular colonnaded court, some rich relief carving and some good marble work; the general effect, among the Arab daintiness, is of an awkward, lumpish, showy manliness, as of a wealthy and rather philistine new aristocracy embarrassingly planted in a harem. Fortunately it was never finished, so lacks the roof and the towering cupola which were meant to dominate the Arab palace and (presumably) to give the lie to the boast inscribed on one of the Moorish cupolas, ‘Here is the wonderful cupola, at sight of whose beautiful proportions all other cupolas vanish and disappear.’

  Leaving the mundane palace, one returns to the Arab fairyland; here is the familiar Court of the Lions, looking much better than it did in our Crystal Palace, with its charming and amiable heraldic beasts, its great alabaster fountain bowl, its smaller fountains set round the court, its light arcades and honeycomb filagree.

  Here is a garden containing wonders of art, the like of which God forbids should elsewhere be found [runs the Arabic inscription round the fountain bowl]. Look at this solid mass of pearl glistening all round, and spreading through the air its showers of prismatic bubbles…. What else is this fountain but a beneficent cloud pouring out its abundant supplies over the lions beneath, like the hands of the Khalif, when he rises in the morning to distribute plentiful rewards among his soldiers, the Lions of war? Oh, thou who beholdest these lions crouching, fear not; life is wanting to enable them to show their fury….

  One of the attractive things about Arabic art is its enthusiastic self-applause. ‘I am the garden,’ says another inscription; ‘every morn I appear decked in beauty. Look attentively at my elegance. For by Allah the elegant buildings by which I am surrounded certainly surpass all other buildings.’ It strikes a different note from any mediaeval Christian utterance.

  In the Court of the Lions, blue and white tiles and marble slabs now pave the floor from which the Moorish tiles were torn by the French invaders, who turned the court into a garden. Imagination cannot capture the brilliant Arab beauty of this plundered, many times whitewashed (the Spanish conquerors had a passion for ‘purification’ of infidel buildings) and now restored court (the ceiling is altogether modern); but its effect is still lovely. After the French had left it, and the Alhambra had been further gutted by Ferdinand VII’s corrupt officials, the Court of Lions was a mass of débris, even some of the lions being broken and flung down; in 1821 an earthquake shook the palace; after that galley-slaves worked away at it, destroying Moorish work to turn some of the rooms into a store for fish. The restoration, when at last it was taken in hand, was creditable; even the fountain plays, on occasion, again. Nothing can defeat one’s enjoyment of this court. Out of it open the Hall of the Abencerrajes, with its succulent stalactite ceiling and sixteenth-century azulejos, the Sala de la Justicia, with its half-orange vaulting and entrancing ceiling paintings, and the Sala de las Dos Hermanas, rich with magnificent honeycomb vaulting and more than Churriguerresque frolic of fantastic decor, like a w
eb of petrified fine lace. ‘Here,’ boasts an inscription, ‘are columns ornamented with every perfection …Columns which, when struck by the rays of the rising sun, one might fancy to be so many blocks of pearl….’ In this room stands the famous enamelled fourteenth-century Alhambra Vase. It is a room of pleasure and rest; round it are raised mosaic sleeping alcoves, which must, even when cushioned and tapestried, have been rather hard.

  Almost as rich in ornament is the two-storied Hall of the Ambassadors, inside the Torre de Comares. The deeply recessed windows open on to great sunlit spaces and steep slopes and the city spreading westward below; the arrangement of windows and vistas and colonnaded miradors shows the exquisite aesthetic awareness of beauty that makes the whole palace such a studied elaboration of art. Beauty for beauty’s sake was the Arabs’ creed; it needed no such excuse as the glory of God; though theirs is a God-conscious art, and Allah in their inscriptions is continually praised, they made beauty for their pleasure. There is here no rearing of towers, vaults and spires heavenward, no ascetic emphasis on holiness and prayer, no scorn of the body; the Arab way of life was to embellish it with every lovely decoration, to seek beauty in colour, elegance, grace, perfumed gardens, and the perpetual singing of water. The bathing rooms of the palace (underground) are delightful, with the galleries above them for musicians to soothe bathers with music while they rested from the exertions of the toilet. The hot-water system was destroyed by the Spanish. What did those hydrophobes, who thought ablutions dangerously infidel, make of it all? They admired and valued the place; as Charles V remarked, ‘Ill-fated the man who lost all this.’ But they daubed much of the coloured ornament with whitewash, broke off Moorish emblems, and destroyed rooms and courts for their own purposes; they changed the lovely mosque into a chapel, blocked up passages, built incongruous additions. It was not an age of architectural or aesthetic principles; one cannot judge them by the standards of our own Building Preservation Societies; and some credit should be given for the preservation of the Alhambra as we see it to-day.