I
THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

Portals of the ancient world – Bay of Tangier at sunrise – Tarifa – The Rock of Gibraltar – Wonders of its fortifications – Afternoon promenade in the Alameda Gardens – Ascending the Rock – View from the highest point – The Great Siege – Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast – The rock of many names.

The “Pillars of Hercules!” The portals of the Ancient World! To how many a traveller just beginning to tire of his week on the Atlantic, or but slowly recovering, it may be, in his tranquil voyage along the coasts of Portugal and Southern Spain, from the effects of thirty unquiet hours in the Bay of Biscay, has the nearing view of this mighty landmark of history brought a message of new life! That distant point ahead, at which the narrowing waters of the Strait that bears him disappear entirely within the clasp of the embracing shores, is for many such a traveller the beginning of romance. He gazes upon it from the westward with some dim reflection of that mysterious awe with which antiquity looked upon it from the East. The progress of the ages has, in fact, transposed the center of human interest and the human point of view. Now, as in the Homeric era, the Pillars of Hercules form the gateway of a world of wonder; but for us of to-day it is within and not without those portals that that world of wonder lies. To the eye of modern poetry the Atlantic and Mediterranean have changed places. In the waste of waters stretching westward from the rock of Calpe and its sister headland, the Greek of the age of Homer found his region of immemorial poetic legend and venerable religious myth, and peopled it with the gods and heroes of his traditional creed. Here, on the bosom of the wide-winding river Oceanus, lay the Islands of the Blest – that abode of eternal beauty and calm, where “the life of mortals is most easy,” where “there is neither snow nor winter nor much rain, but ocean is ever sending up the shrilly breezes of Zephyrus to refresh man.” But for us moderns who have explored this mighty “river Oceanus,” this unknown and mysterious Atlantic to its farthest recesses, the glamor of its mystery has passed away for ever; and it is eastward and not westward, through the “Pillars of Hercules,” that we now set our sails in search of the region of romance. It is to the basin of the Mediterranean – fringed with storied cities and venerable ruins, with the crumbling sanctuaries of a creed which has passed away, and the monuments of an art which is imperishable – that man turns to-day. The genius of civilization has journeyed far to the westward, and has passed through strange experiences; it returns with new reverence and a deeper awe to that enclave of mid-Europe which contains its birthplace, and which is hallowed with the memories of its glorious youth. The grand cliff-portal which we are approaching is the entrance, the thoughtful traveller will always feel, to a region eternally sacred in the history of man; to lands which gave birth to immortal models of literature and unerring canons of philosophic truth; to shrines and temples which guard the ashes of those “dead but sceptered sovereigns” who “rule our spirits from their urns.”

As our vessel steams onward through the rapidly narrowing Straits, the eye falls upon a picturesque irregular cluster of buildings on the Spanish shore, wherefrom juts forth a rocky tongue of land surmounted by a tower. It is the Pharos of Tarifa, and in another half hour we are close enough to distinguish the exact outlines of the ancient and famous city named of Tarif Ibn Malek, the first Berber sheikh who landed in Spain, and itself, it is said – though some etymologists look askance at the derivation – the name-mother of a word which is little less terrible to the modern trader than was this pirate’s nest itself to his predecessor of old times. The arms of Tarifa are a castle on waves, with a key at the window, and the device is not unaptly symbolical of her mediæval history, when her possessors played janitors of the Strait, and merrily levied blackmail – the irregular tariff of those days – upon any vessel which desired to pass. The little town itself is picturesquely situated in the deepest embrace of the curving Strait, and the view looking westward – with the lighthouse rising sharp and sheer against the sky, from the jutting cluster of rock and building about its base, while dimly to the left in the farther distance lie the mountains of the African coast, descending there so cunningly behind the curve that the two continents seem to touch and connect the channel into a lake – is well worth attentive study. An interesting spot, too, is Tarifa, as well as a picturesque – interesting at least to all who are interested either in the earlier or the later fortunes of post-Roman Europe. It played its part, as did most other places, on this common battle-ground of Aryan and Semite, in the secular struggle between European Christendom and the Mohammedan East. And again, centuries later, it was heard of in the briefer but more catastrophic struggle of the Napoleonic wars. From the day when Alonzo Perez de Guzman threw his dagger down from its battlements in disdainful defiance of the threat to murder his son, dragged bound before him beneath its walls by traitors, it is a “far cry” to the day when Colonel Gough of the 87th (the “Eagle-Catchers”) beat off Marshal Victor’s besieging army of 1,800 strong, and relieved General Campbell and his gallant little garrison; but Tarifa has seen them both, and it is worth a visit not only for the sake of the ride from it over the mountains to Algeciras and Gibraltar, but for its historical associations also, and for its old-world charm.

We have taken it, as we propose also to take Tangier, a little out of its turn; for the voyaging visitor to Gibraltar is not very likely to take either of these two places on his way. It is more probable that he will visit them, the one by land and the other by sea, from the Rock itself. But Tangier in particular it is impossible to pass without a strong desire to make its acquaintance straightway; so many are the attractions which draw the traveller to this some-time appanage of the British Crown, this African pied à terre, which but for the insensate feuds and factions of the Restoration period might be England’s to-day. There are few more enchanting sights than that of the Bay of Tangier as it appears at sunrise to the traveller whose steamer has dropped down the Straits in the afternoon and evening hours of the previous day and cast anchor after nightfall at the nearest point off shore to which a vessel of any draught can approach. Nowhere in the world does a nook of such sweet tranquillity receive, and for a season, quiet, the hurrying waters of so restless a sea. Half a mile or so out towards the center of the Strait, a steamer from Gibraltar has to plough its way through the surface currents which speed continually from the Atlantic towards the Pillars of Hercules and the Mediterranean beyond. Here, under the reddening daybreak, all is calm. The blue waters of the bay, now softly flushing at the approach of sunrise, break lazily in mimic waves and “tender curving lines of creamy spray” upon the shining beach. To the right lies the city, spectral in the dawn, save where the delicate pale ivory of some of its higher houses is warming into faintest rose; while over all, over sea and shore and city, is the immersing crystal atmosphere of Africa, in which every rock, every ripple, every housetop, stands out as sharp and clear as the filigree work of winter on a frosted pane.

Nothing in Tangier, it must be honestly admitted, will compare with the approach to it by its incomparable bay. In another sense, too, there is nothing here or elsewhere which exactly resembles this “approach,” since its last stage of all has to be performed alike for man and woman – unless man is prepared to wade knee-deep in the clear blue water – on the back of a sturdy Moor. Once landed, he will find that the picturesqueness of Tangier, like that of most Eastern cities, diminishes rather than increases on a nearer view. A walk through its main street yields nothing particularly worthy of note, unless it be the minaret of the Djama-el-Kebir, the principal mosque of the city. The point to which every visitor to Tangier directs his steps, or has them directed for him, is the Bab-el-Sok, the gate of the market place, where the scene to be witnessed at early morning presents an unequaled picture of Oriental life. Crouching camels with their loads of dates, chaffering traders, chattering women, sly and servile looking Jews from the city, fierce-eyed, heavily armed children of the desert, rough-coated horses, and the lank-sided mules, withered crones squatting in groups by the wayside, tripping damsels ogling over the yashmak as they pass, and the whole enveloped in a blinding, bewildering, choking cloud of such dust as only Africa, “arida nutrix,” can produce – such dust as would make the pulverulent particles of the dryest of turnpikes in the hottest of summers, and under the most parching of east winds, appear by comparison moist and cool, and no more than pleasingly titillatory of the mouth and nostrils – let the reader picture to himself such a scene with such accessories, and he will know what spectacle awaits him at early morning at the Bab-el-Sok of Tangier.

But we must resume our journey eastward towards the famous “Rock.” There at last it is! There “dawns Gibraltar grand and gray,” though Mr. Browning strains poetic license very hard in making it visible even “in the dimmest north-east distance,” to a poet who was at that moment observing how “sunset ran one glorious blood-red recking into Cadiz Bay.” We, at any rate, are far enough away from Cadiz before it dawns upon us in all its Titanic majesty of outline; grand, of course, with the grandeur of Nature, and yet with a certain strange air of human menace as of some piece of Atlantean ordnance planted and pointed by the hand of man. This “armamental” appearance of the Rock – a look visible, or at any rate imaginable in it, long before we have approached it closely enough to discern its actual fortifications, still less its artillery – is much enhanced by the dead flatness of the land from which its western wall arises sheer, and with which by consequence it seems to have no closer physical connection than has a gun-carriage with the parade ground on which it stands. As we draw nearer this effect increases in intensity. The surrounding country seems to sink and recede around it, and the Rock appears to tower ever higher and higher, and to survey the Strait and the two continents, divided by it with a more and more formidable frown. As we approach the port, however, this impression gives place to another, and the Rock, losing somewhat of its “natural-fortress” air, begins to assume that resemblance to a couchant lion which has been so often noticed in it. Yet alas! for the so-called famous “leonine aspect” of the famous height, or alas! at least for the capricious workings of the human imagination! For while to the compiler of one well-reputed guidebook, the outlines of Gibraltar seem “like those of a lion asleep, and whose head, somewhat truncated, is turned towards Africa as if with a dreamy and steadfast deep attention;” to another and later observer the lion appears to have “his kingly head turned towards Spain, as if in defiance of his former master, every feature having the character of leonine majesty and power!” The truth is, of course, that the Rock assumes entirely different aspects, according as it is looked at from different points of view. There is certainly a point from which Gibraltar may be made, by the exercise of a little of Polonius’s imagination, to resemble some couchant animal with its head turned towards Africa – though “a head somewhat truncated,” is as odd a phrase as a “body somewhat decapitated” – and contemplating that continent with what we may fancy, if we choose, to be “dreamy and steadfast attention.” But the resemblance is, at best, but a slender one, and a far-fetched. The really and strikingly leonine aspect of Gibraltar is undoubtedly that which it presents to the observer as he is steaming towards the Rock from the west, but has not yet come into full view of the slope on which the town is situated. No one can possibly mistake the lion then. His head is distinctly turned towards Spain, and what is more, he has a foot stretched out towards the mainland, as though in token of his mighty grasp upon the soil. Viewed, however, from the neutral ground, this Protean cliff takes on a new shape altogether, and no one would suppose that the lines of that sheer precipice, towering up into a jagged pinnacle, could appear from any quarter to melt into the blunt and massive curves which mark the head and shoulders of the King of Beasts.

At last, however, we are in the harbor, and are about to land. To land! How little does that phrase convey to the inexperienced in sea travel, or to those whose voyages have begun and ended in stepping from a landing-stage on to a gangway, and from a gangway on to a deck, and vice-versâ! And how much does it mean for him to whom it comes fraught with recollections of steep descents, of heaving seas, of tossing cock-boats, perhaps of dripping garments, certainly of swindling boatmen! There are disembarkations in which you come in for them all; but not at Gibraltar, at least under normal circumstances. The waters of the port are placid, and from most of the many fine vessels that touch there you descend by a ladder, of as agreeable an inclination as an ordinary flight of stairs. All you have to fear is the insidious bilingual boatman, who, unless you strictly covenant with him before entering his boat, will have you at his mercy. It is true that he has a tariff, and that you might imagine that the offense of exceeding it would be punished in a place like Gibraltar by immediate court-martial and execution; but the traveller should not rely upon this. There is a deplorable relaxation of the bonds of discipline all over the world. Moreover, it is wise to agree with the boatmen for a certain fixed sum, as a salutary check upon undue liberality. Most steamers anchor at a considerable distance from the shore, and on a hot day one might be tempted by false sentiment to give the boatman an excessive fee.