translated from the original spanish by
ISAAC GOLDBERG
JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY
BOSTON 1919
| LUNA BENAMOR I, II, III, IV THE TOAD COMPASSION LUXURY RABIES THE WINDFALL THE LAST LION |
LUIS AGUIRRE had been living in Gibraltar for about a month. He hadarrived with the intention of sailing at once upon a vessel bound forOceanica, where he was to assume his post as a consul to Australia. Itwas the first important voyage of his diplomatic career. Up to that timehe had served in Madrid, in the offices of the Ministry, or in variousconsulates of southern France, elegant summery places where for half theyear life was a continuous holiday. The son of a family that had beendedicated to diplomacy by tradition, he enjoyed the protection ofinfluential persons. His parents were dead, but he was helped by hisrelatives and the prestige of a name that for a century had figured inthe archives of the nation. Consul at the age of twenty-five, he wasabout to set sail with the illusions of a student who goes out into theworld for the first time, feeling that all previous trips have beeninsignificant.
Gibraltar, incongruous and exotic, a mixture of races and languages, wasto him the first sign of the far-off world in quest of which he wasjourneying. He doubted, in his first surprise, if this rocky landjutting into the open sea and under a foreign flag, could be a part ofhis native peninsula. When he gazed out from the sides of the cliffacross the vast blue bay with its rose-colored mountains dotted by thebright settlements of La Línea, San Roque and Algeciras,—the cheerywhiteness of Andalusian towns,—he felt convinced that he was still inSpain. But great difference distinguished the human groups camped uponthe edge of this horseshoe of earth that embraced the bay. From theheadland of Tarifa to the gates of Gibraltar, a monotonous unity ofrace; the happy warbling of the Andalusian dialect; the broad-brimmedhat; the mantilla about the women's bosoms and the glistening hairadorned with flowers. On the huge mountain topped by the British flagand enclosing the oriental part of the bay, a seething cauldron ofraces, a confusion of tongues, a carnival of costume: Hindus, Mussulmen,English, Hebrews, Spanish smugglers, soldiers in red coats, sailors fromevery nation, living within the narrow limits of the fortifications,subjected to military discipline, beholding the gates of thecosmopolitan sheepfold open with the signal at sunrise and close at thebooming of the sunset gun. And as the frame of this picture, vibrantwith its mingling of color and movement, a range of peaks, the highlandsof Africa, the Moroccan mountains, stretched across the distant horizon,on the opposite shore of the strait; here is the most crowded of thegreat marine boulevards, over whose bl