Part 72

“Just learned C—— left to-day for Granada with same party. Took train, and whether shipped automobile not found out. C—— believed to be ill. Friend at club says C—— been heard say knows at Granada man worth twenty physicians, natural bone-setter, herb doctor. Perhaps wishes consult this person. Illness seems mysterious. House of C—— well known at Granada. Inquire at Washington Irving, where suppose you will stay. Will wire or write to that address.”

I should have been off within the hour, but the quickest way of reaching Granada was by Ronda, and there was no road for automobiles. One could walk, one could ride, along a bridle path through gorges unsurpassed for grandeur; but it was an expedition of two days, whereas if we could curb our impatience until early morning, we would reach Ronda by train in about four hours.

Not being quite mad, we waited, rose at five, and before seven were steaming out of Algeciras, while the great cloud-cataract of the Levanter churned and boiled over Gibraltar. On a truck, travelling by the same train, was my brave Gloria, none the worse for yesterday’s wild flight, and ready for another when she could take the road beyond Ronda. I had not ceased yet to wonder at the expedition with which she had been shipped. Dick discovered, however, that the manager of the line was a Scotsman, a kind of fairy godfather for all the region round, which explained the mystery; and his road was wonderful. In a glass coach, which was an “observation car,” we tore through scenery so diversified that it might have been chosen from the finest bits of a whole continent. There were wooded ravines tapestried with pink sweetbrier; there were far hill-towns like flocks of gulls resting on the edge of giddy precipices; there were strange old fortresses; ruined Moorish castles; velvet-green fields with aloe hedges grey as lines of broken slate; dark, noble gorges sprinkled with mother-o’-pearl flakes of white wild roses, that drifted down the red rock into water green as onyx. There were blossomy bits of Holland and long tracts of Switzerland. Glacier-mills in narrow gorges were like empty niches for colossal statues of saints; pink and white orchards foamed at the feet of ancient look-out towers; black rocks, like huge watch-dogs, seemed to crouch on cushions of wild flowers; and weeping willows fringed the river with silver before it dashed away to do battle among the mountains; acacias showered perfume, and orange groves pushed so near to the train that a hand reached out could have plucked their golden globes.

There were caves and underground rivers, haunted by enchanted Moors; and at last, a brief glimpse of Ronda hanging high against the sky, vanishing like the fabled Garden of Iram, and not to be seen again until the train mounted the cliff by many loops.

Just as we arrived at the end of the journey a thought in my brain seemed to snap like the trigger of a carbine. In my haste to get off by the first morning train I had forgotten to try and find more petrol at Algeciras, although I had not enough left to get the car to Granada.

There was just time to telegraph back to the Reina Cristina and beg some of the young Californian, who had fallen so deeply in love with the place that he intended to stay a week. We had become friendly and he would certainly grant the favour, therefore we might count on travelling that night by acetylene and moonlight. Meanwhile, there was a long day to wait, but I tramped off my restlessness as best I could in exploring every foot of Ronda.

After that one look upward from the train, when Ronda hung before our eyes over a thousand foot gorge, we had at last sneaked in, so to speak, by a back door. If it had not been for that first glimpse, and if we had not read “Miranda of the Balcony” we should not have guessed, in walking from the station to the Alameda, that Ronda differed from other Moorish towns. But far away was a barrier of iron railing, and a curious effect as if beyond it everything ended except the sky. We walked on, reached that railing, and leaned over.

No picture, no book had been able to give us a real idea of Ronda. It was stupendous—wonderful. We stared down at the world beneath as if we hung in a balloon, for the rock fell away from our feet, a sheer precipice; and men working in the valley below were like tiny crabs. The Moorish mills were white, broken hour-glasses, shaking out a stream of silver; geese on the river were floating bread-crumbs; a string of donkeys crawling up the steep Moorish road were invisible under their packs, which looked like mushrooms with moving stems.

The noise of the river floated up to us with a muffled roar, and across the deep valley its water had cut, tumbled a wild mountain-land, crossed here and there by white threads of road which clung to the sky-line and disappeared.

“Great Scott, if this eagle’s nest doesn’t take the cake!” exclaimed Dick, always modern. “If there were any more to take, it could have that, too. Hurrah for you, rock and river. You’re sublime.”

But we had not seen all, by hanging over that iron railing, nor nearly all. There was the palace of the Moorish King, and the terrible steps cut by Christian captives. There was the bridge swung over the gorge; and the far-famed “window” of rock, one of the wonders of the world. There was the old Roman amphitheatre, turned into a bull-ring; the town wall, which Hercules helped to build; the Roman gate, and the Moorish gate, and the house where Miranda lived; and a hundred other things to be found by mounting steep hills or sliding down wild precipices.

The splendid mountain air had given Dick a ferocious appetite; nevertheless he could hardly be torn from the cliff above the “window,” and vowed that it would be worth while coming all the way from New York to Ronda next year when the grand new hotel should be finished.

Rain fell while we lunched, but we wandered out again, in a thin mist like a sieve, through which sifted turquoises and silver spangles; nor did we cease wandering until it was time for the train to arrive with the expected petrol. The Californian had not failed us; and with a good supply of food for the Gloria, and enough for ourselves to last until morning, we set off, against the advice of everyone.

The sky had cleared, and twilight would soon merge into moonlight; but we would need the moon and stars as well on the road we had to travel. In more than one place it was marked on my map by an ominous, thin black line which meant “Motorists, beware.” The country was sparsely populated; people whispered of bandidos; and if anything happened to the car in the middle of the night, there would be no means of getting help.

Still, if we won through without serious mishap, we should save a day; for there was no train to Granada until morning, and Dick was as keen on the adventure, for the adventure’s sake, as I was for another reason.

After all, we reminded each other, it was a journey of only a hundred and twenty miles. With no traffic to interfere, the Gloria ought to fly over the distance in four hours; and what if everyone did try to discourage us? We had experienced that sort of thing in Biarritz, and the dangers had resolved themselves into chimeras. Nothing in Spain was as troublesome nowadays as the busybodies would have one believe—not even the beggars.

My big searchlights cast a flashing ring on the road, which the car seemed to push swiftly before it as it ran.

Dick peered through the uncertain light for the hill town of Teba, from which the Empress Eugenie took her title, but my eyes were glued to the road.

To think, if we had known at Jerez that Granada was the lodestar, we could have reached Ronda in a run of four hours day before yesterday! But it was useless to repine, and fate had given us Ronda.

By the time we had passed through the straggling village of Campillos the moon was up, a great white, incandescent globe of light, so brilliant that instead of draining colour from rock, and grass, and flower, it gave new and almost supernatural values to all.

We had the world to ourselves, a wonderful world like a vast silver bowl half full of jewels. Over the tops of mountains cut jaggedly of steel, strange figures seemed to run along the horizon. Bathed in unearthly radiance lay fields of poppies like deep lakes of blood filling the valleys between little rolling hills, and here and there a miniature mountain of pink or glittering grey, rose out of the plain like a fairy palace which would be invisible in daylight. Olive trees stretching away in straight lines on either side of endless avenues, fountained silver under the moon, each avenue swept by a wave of poppies. It was an Aladdin’s Cave landscape made out of rare metals and precious stones that imitated trees and flowers.

Antiquera on its wild crags, was a ragged black hole in the silver sky, until we shot into the town under the dominating castle of crimson memories.

There, was life and music still; guitars tinkled, children who should have been in bed frolicked in the streets with lambs that followed them like dogs, while everyone, old and young, laughed and hooted at the Gloria as she shot by without stopping, on her way to Loja and Granada.

A sharp turn to the left swept us out of Antiquera, and so good was the road that Dick and I began to laugh at the gloomy prognostications which thus far had not been fulfilled.

My spirits rose to such a height that as we passed under the Lovers’ Rock, still haunted by the Moorish maiden and her Christian lover, I quoted Southey, verse after verse of the old-fashioned poetry coming back to my mind. The Peña de los Enamorados stood up like a small model of Gibraltar, rising out of the plain; and as we wound on among other pinnacles almost as majestic, we could see the bleached skeleton of Archidona hanging on its mountain. Once the place had been a famous nest of brigands; and when after climbing a tremendous hill, we had come into its long white street, Dick was of opinion that Archidona of to-day was still an ideal summer resort for the fraternity in case they should crave a town life. Each low-browed house in the interminable avenue looked a fit nursery for mysteries and secrets. Here and there a dark face framed in a knotted red handkerchief peered from a lighted doorway, staring after the Gloria until she had slipped over the brow of the hill to coast smoothly down another as steep.

There, had we but known, the peaceful olive grove through which we passed and hushed the song of nightingales was to be our last glimpse of peace. Beyond that silver barrier lay chaos, a chaos of wild mountains, deep chasms, and grim steppes, solitary, unpeopled, forbidding under the moon!

If we broke an axle here, with leagues to walk to the nearest farm, there was no hope of Granada to-morrow. And now the road was equally well fitted for breaking axles, necks, and hearts.

It was made of rock in petrified waves, among which the Gloria floundered and buck-jumped as long ago Dick had expected her to do when she crossed the Spanish border. Every part of her shivered as though she were a horse in the bull-ring, and I pitied her as if she had a nerve in every spring and chain.