Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  The infidels, however, had not done with Algeciras; in 1369 it was almost completely destroyed by an attack from the King of Granada; a century later its territory and ruins were given to Gibraltar, which quarried fortifications out of them. It lay ruined for three centuries and a half, until many of the inhabitants of Gibraltar fled there from the English; after that it was gradually rebuilt (partly out of the Carteia ruins), and its population quickly grew. Convents were built, plazas and streets laid out; in the largest plaza, the Plaza Alta, the cathedral of Santa Maria replaced the ancient parish church; it was a companion cathedral to Cadiz, and has a dull look. In 1760 Charles III began to enlarge the town; the process has gone on ever since. The old Moorish town had been on the right bank of the river that divides the city; the eighteenth-century town was built on the left, with broad streets and three fine plazas; the symmetrical Plaza Alta, with cathedral, trees and fountain; below it, close to the mole, the Plaza Baja, with its lively market, where Moors in fezes from Morocco chaffer with Moors without fezes from Spain; the smaller Plaza San Isidoro in the north-east quarter. The town, which has nowhere a characteristically eighteenth-century look, for it was rebuilt in the Arab manner, is handsome and spacious, full of fine Moorish-looking houses with patios, fountains and roof gardens. The Hotel Cristina is a de luxe model, like the Rock Hotel at Gibraltar, white and rambling, with fine gardens and magnificent views across the bay; the British see it from the Rock, and stay in it when on holiday. Algeciras is a city of pleasure, luxury and beauty, with its harbour of little ships and fishing fleets and steamers crossing to and from Africa, which lies, a grey-blue shadow, across the way. The superb horseshoe of tossing blue sea, with the picturesque island moored outside the port, the couching Rock to eastward, the jut of Tarifa to westward, the great ocean expanding beyond the Straits, and the mountains rising behind, make a fine setting to this handsome and lordly city. It seemed suited rather to rich British and continental tourists and oriental sultans than to me in my battered, dust-smeared car; I felt no temptation to linger, but took the road to Tarifa.

  This ran through wild moorland country, desolate and bare; the August afternoon burned on the arid, thymey, cork-forested hills, where the cicadas hoarsely sawed; the shadowless road wound and bent, framing in its angles what I feared must, now that Algeciras Bay was behind me, be called the Atlantic; anyhow it was not the Mediterranean. It was blue enough; the shadowy, mist-cloaked Outer Ocean, monstrous with intimidating creatures, still wore a civilized air.

  Not so Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, whose square-towered castle rose before me, guarding the white, entirely Moorish town, with its long narrow winding streets, flat-roofed houses, and quiet, idling, Arab-eyed groups of natives. Leaving my car on the road outside the walled city, I entered its streets through one of the round arches that open into them, and braced myself to ignore the mob of stalking savages that would, I supposed, in a moment collect. But I was for once fortunate; down one of the streets that crossed mine I saw a dense crowd of children stalking, and before them went, inembarrassed haste, another female foreigner. She had drawn the hunt, and, taking another turning, I evaded it, and was able to explore Tarifa unpursued. It is a fascinating town; perhaps the most Moorish in Andalucia, and the first to become so, for Tarif the Arab arrived there from Africa and wrested it from the Visigoths the year before Tarik the Berber got to Gibraltar. Tarif proceeded to make of Tarifa a strong fortress, which was besieged in vain until Sancho el Bravo took it in 1292, and Alonso de Guzman, defending it against counterattacks, got himself into legend as the dutiful commandant and callous parent. The fortress still stands at the eastern end of the town, with its thick embrasured walls set with small towers, early Moorish work, of which century is uncertain. In the city walls are round-arched gateways, through which one dives into the narrow streets, where beautiful oriental women, black hooded, stand at their doors, and sweet oranges are driven behind tiny donkeys by little boys. The parroquial is mainly fifteenth century; it has three broad naves, a magnificent door, and a poor tower. The houses are low and white; the iron balconies bright with flowers and blue pots; below the streets and above the sea an alameda runs. Beyond the town is a long isthmus with an island at the end, the Isola de las Palombas, now connected by a narrow causeway running very “beautifully between two small fishing harbours and beaches, where copper-skinned children bathed, and ending at gates beyond which passage was barred, for a fortress and lighthouse have been built there. Here is the Punta Marroquí, the southernmost point of Spain; the Phoenicians called it Josa, which is Phoenician for passage, the Romans Julia Traducta. From it one sees the Mediterranean to the east and the Atlantic to the west; for now we are really come to the Outer Ocean.

  Returning to my car, I met the hunt in full cry; their quarry had emerged out of the streets into the road outside, the pack at her heels. She looked distressed and cross as she came towards me, seeking protection in the company of a fellow-victim. The pack, sighting me, gathered round their double quarry and the car, nudging and pointing. ‘Mais, c’est formidable!’ the flustered lady exclaimed, trying to laugh. She was a nice-looking Frenchwoman, at the moment flushed with heat, embarrassment and annoyance. I told her it was wiser to take no notice, for this made them worse; one should go on one’s way as if they did not exist. She, it seemed, had turned and protested, a fatal mistake. She told me that she had not been long in Spain; she was married to a Spaniard; they were staying at the Cristina in Algeciras and she had come to Tarifa in the car of an American friend, which was to return and pick her up presently. She had not known, she said, what it was like to walk about Tarifa alone, or she would never have tried it. It was incroyable, the manners of these children and young people, and that no adult called them off. I told her that it was just Spanish curiosity, and that one got used to it in time. ‘And you go about alone, madame?’ she said. ‘You are very brave. I confess that I could not face it.’ It was a bore, I agreed, but if one wanted to see Spain, it was worth it. Her husband, she said, did not like her going about alone; he had told her that Spanish ladies never did it. Were he here, he would box the ears of the children; he had done so the other day in Algeciras when one of them was rude to her. I began to understand why the stalking children ducked if one looked round.

  At this point the car of her American friend arrived; she hurried to its shelter with the relief of a traveller in a wild country rescued from savages. These, I reflected as I drove away, were the Turdetanians, of whom Strabo wrote, ‘The Turdetani not only enjoy a salubrious climate, but their manners are polished and urbane,’ They had, he said, gentleness and civility, had forgotten their own language, and lived in the Roman manner, having become, for the most part, togati. That was two thousand years ago. And Strabo was never in Spain. The present inhabitants of Tarifa were perhaps more like the feroces Libyphcenices who lived across the water.

  A fresh wind blew about Punta Marroquí; the sea outside the little sheltered harbour broke in waves on the beach as I drove north-west along the shores of the Atlantic towards Cadiz. The fabulous shores of Turdetania, of the ancient rich Tartessian land where the Phoenicians traded and founded their cities, where Heracles adventured and drove cattle and took legendary possession of the whole fabled sea and shore, where Odysseus too voyaged, where Homer placed the abode of the blessed and of the damned, where lay the lost Atlantis, where bloomed the Hesperides with their golden orchards, and (more historically) the golden and silver wealth with which Tyrians trafficked down all the coasts of Europe and of Africa. I wished that my road ran closer to the sea. It bent inland, through a wild dry mountain land, smelling of hot prickly pears, cactuses, cork trees; on my left ranged the Silla del Papa, shutting out the sea, on my right the Utreras, with higher sierras rearing behind. Between two rocky heights spread the marshy Laguna de Janda, which Avienus says was called in his day Herma; round it Tarik fought Roderick the Goth, whom he was to beat finally at Guadalete. If the lagoon had more water, it would be a g
ood lake. A little way beyond it, above the bridge over the Barbate, rises the precipitous hill on whose summit stands the fortified Moorish-Iberian town of Vejer de la Frontera. Vejer must be a very fine and interesting town; it looks, anyhow, very well from below, and I had been told by some one who had seen it that it had a good Gothic Mudéjar church. But it stands at the top of a very high hill, and few travellers seem to get near enough to it to describe it. I was sorry to join the unenterprising herd, which includes Ford, Baedeker, Muirhead, and most other tourists in these parts; but evening was approaching, and I wánted to get to Cadiz, and it was hot, and the road looked both steep and bad, and at the foot of the hill was a little venta where I stopped for a drink, watched by an absorbed family group, who, I believe, had not seen a foreign woman since Alfonso XI fought and beat the Kings of Granada and Fez in that neighbourhood six centuries before. They fed me with sandwiches and inquired after my family, whom I seemed to have unaccountably left at home in France; or perhaps, they suggested, hearing that I was bound for Cadiz, my husband awaited me there, too ill to come and drive me. I found myself soon committed to transporting as far as San Fernando two large young soldiers bound for Jerez with two large wooden chests. I hoped that they might tell me something about Vejer as we drove, but they could not; it was to them just Vejer, or Vélez, and of no interest; they were uninformed youths, and knew nothing about anything we passed on the way, only that, if I could not take them all the way to Jerez, they would like to be dropped in the San Fernando plaza in time to get the bus. So Vejer I still only know by hearsay. Photographs I have seen show very white patios and interiors with wells, and donkeys standing by them, and Moorish-robed women on ancient stairways. Some one had mentioned to me the parish church; a Spanish encyclopaedia adds that Vejer has narrow streets, old houses and picturesque and wide views (which one can deduce by looking at it from below), is one of the oldest towns on this coast, contains many churches of unspecified dates, was conquered by Ferdinand in 1248, and that the French climbed up and occupied it in 1811, which does them great credit. Next time I pass that way I shall follow their example. This time I drove on, getting impressive glimpses of the mountain-top city as the road twisted past it.

  The hampering presence of my soldiers prevented my turning aside to see Medina Sidonia, twelve miles away in the hills to my right, or the mouth of the Sancti Petri channel across the salt marsh country to my left, where lies the fortified island of Sancti Petri, in which I did not feel that my companions would be interested. The one advantage of transporting these young men was that their chaperonage seemed to check the usual hoots and yells at a female driver from those we passed on the road; perhaps it was not apparent as we drove by who held the wheel.

  We drove on through the salt marshes, which were dotted with upright salt pillars, as if hundreds of the wives of Lot, fleeing long ago from the wicked city of Gades Jocosae, had turned to look back wistfully at the gay goings on there, and been salted in their tracks.

  The Sancti Petri channel was very beautiful; it formed a harbour of green water beneath the San Fernando bridge, where large fishing boats lay. San Fernando itself is a pretty town, though a naval headquarters and arsenal. It is the capital of the Isla de Leon; it has a spacious street and plaza, and most of its pleasant low white houses with their charming bright green rejas and balconies were built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after Charles had made the place a naval arsenal. The naval buildings and the iron foundry are fortunately in a suburb away from the main town, which has a nicely civil and leisured air, standing so whitely on the green channel among the wide salt plains.

  Across the channel is the Isla Leon, the Erytheia of the ancients, where Geryon lived with his cattle that Heracles drove off, ‘the island called Erytheia, near Gadeira outside the Pillars of Heracles by the Ocean,’ as Herodotus describes it. Strabo says there was good grass on it, and its cattle grew fat. On it stood the temple of the Phoenician Heracles; it was probably the earliest Phoenician settlement, before Gadir. The road ran smoothly across it, past the eighteenth-century observatory, to the long narrow isthmus that pushes out to sea holding Cadiz like a greatlily bud at a stem’s end. It is one of the lovely wonders of the world, this long cause way road, built on arches, thrusting an arm between the smooth blue circle of Cadiz Bay and the dancing silver immensity of the Atlantic. On the mainland side of the bay, the peninsula of Trocadero curves, shutting the deeply indented harbour of Puerto Real from the Atlantic winds and waves. At the end of the isthmus Cadiz and its pale domes lie like a spray of water-lilies on a gleaming turquoise lake under a peach-bloom sky. No city can have a lovelier approach than Gades Jocosae, now Cadiz la Joyosa. It is perhaps, says Pliny, a fragment of the lost Atlantis, that, as we know from Plato, lies sunk somewhere off that coast. It was, says Avienus, in his muddled way, formerly Tartessos - ‘Ipsa Tartessos prius cognominata est.’ It was a common confusion, this between the long-destroyed Tartessos and the great Phoenician and Carthaginian city that was heir (if Tartessos indeed was ever a city at all) to its magnificence. Even many fifth-century Greeks made it, and, later, nearly all the Romans except those who ran Carteia-Tartessos as a rival claimant. When Avienus wrote his enigmatic, and surely (in the fourth century) premature lines on the fallen state of Gades, ‘that great and rich city, ancient in age, now poor, small, destitute, a heap of ruins,’ ‘nunc destituta, nunc ruinarum agger est,’ in which there was nothing left to admire but the temple of Hercules, his identification of Gades with the ruined Tartessos may have led him into exaggeration. Gades in the late empire had declined in importance, but can scarcely have been ruined yet.

  That the Tyrian hero founded Cadiz we can believe if we choose: though the stories of its oracle-guided founding Strabo dismisses as Phoenician lies. One would like to keep for it the traditional date of 1100 B.C.; but historians tend now to take three centuries from this, which seems a pity. Anyhow, to found Gadir was one of the first things the Phoenicians did when they reached Spain; it became the rich mart and centre of their trading in Europe, as Carthage was in Africa. It grew in size, opulence and authority; it became a fabulous exporter and importer of wealth. Silver, tin, amber, sailed in and out of its deep harbour. Extending, one would suppose vulnerably, for miles into the sea on its slender stem, it yet seemed impregnable. In it Phoenician and Carthaginian merchants dwelt and traded; and to it doubtless Kolaios the Samian came when his seventh-century ship was blown westward to the Tartessian shores; and a century later the Phocaean Greeks traded there until the ocean west of the Pillars was shut to them. Cadiz may always have been the chief Tartessian port; for was the fabled Tartessos a city, or only a region and kingdom? Herodotus leaves it open: he never uses the word ‘city’ of Tartessos, though his loose translator Rawlinson gratuitously throws it in whenever Tartessos is mentioned. When Herodotus speaks of ‘they who discovered the Adriatic and Tyrsenia and Iberia and Tartessos’ (not ‘the city of Tartessos,’ as Rawlinson has it) Tartessos would seem more reasonably in line with the others if it were not a town but a region. Yet the tradition has persisted and persists of this opulent city port, on some undiscovered site between the Pillars and the Guadalquivir, which was destroyed by Carthaginians about 500 B.C., in order that their town of Gades might reign without a rival. The Greeks, as has been observed, always tended to think of a State in terms of a city, and would scarcely have been content without their vanished Tartessos, whose ghost still haunts the Tartessian shores, as the drowned Atlantis haunts the ocean, while her great successor lies, a spray of white blossom, across the deep blue Tartessian Gulf.

  To walk the white streets of modern Cadiz, that sing and breathe of the sea, is to be companioned by the ghosts of nearly three thousand years. Here, after Phoenician and Carthaginian merchant navigators and merchant princes had piled city and harbour with wealth and grandeur, and Hamilcar had used it as his base of operations against Rome, and Gades had deserted Carthage and become, as reward, a favoured Roman city, Romans a
nd Greeks came and enjoyed its amenities with Italian and Grecian zest for five centuries. They loaded and adorned it with marble, they built their villas and gardens all about and around it, learned and curious inquirers came to watch (as had Pytheas long ago) its extraordinary Atlantic tides, rich and luxurious livers to enjoy its dancing girls, its erotic music, its delicious potted meats and rich varieties of fish, its fabulous oriental luxury, its sea air and hot sun, its public entertainments, its mystic religious miracles and rites, its ebbing and flowing wells, its temples and altars to the god Hercules or Melkarth, to the maritime Aphrodite, to the forces of nature and time, life and death. All these religious and social amenities, commercial opulence, gaiety, luxury and vice, attracted a great cosmopolitan concourse of merchants and citizens; it was, says Strabo, second only to Rome in population. It was Urbs Julia Gaditana; it had, under Augustus, five hundred equites; the rich Balbus uncle and nephew enlarged the city, made the harbour of Puerto Real, built the bridge over the Sancti Petri. Visits to jocosae Gades were cheerful, riotous, opulent affairs; Gaditan slaves and dancing girls would be trafficked about by the disreputable slave masters of whom Martial speaks; music and entertainments and delicious banquets, admiration of the tides and wells and mystic trees that gave milk, voyages about the bay and along the warm Baetic shores, pleasure with lovely golden-skinned long-eyed gaditanas and gaditanos, so much more beautiful than Roman girls and boys, fleeted the Gades season happily away, Gaditans had an immoral reputation in Rome; Gades was to Romans what Paris once seemed to Britons, but far better, because of the sun, and the beauty of its citizens.