LITMIR.BIZ

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      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.

      Your hosts at Gibraltar – “spoiling” as they always are for the sight of new civilian faces – show themselves determined from the first to make you at home. Private Thomas Atkins on sentry duty grins broad welcome to you from the Mole. The official to whom you have to give account of yourself and your belongings greets you with a pleasant smile, and, while your French or Spanish fellow-traveller is strictly interrogated as to his identity, profession, purpose of visit, &c., your English party is passed easily and promptly in, as men “at home” upon the soil which they are treading. Fortunate is it, if a little bewildering, for the visitor to arrive at midday, for before he has made his way from the landing-place to his hotel he will have seen a sight which has few if any parallels in the world. Gibraltar has its narrow, quiet, sleepy alleys as have all Southern towns; and any one who confined himself to strolling through and along these, and avoiding the main thoroughfare, might never discover the strangely cosmopolitan character of the place. He must walk up Waterport Street at midday in order to see what Gibraltar really is – a conflux of nations, a mart of races, an Exchange for all the multitudinous varieties of the human product. Europe, Asia, and Africa meet and jostle in this singular highway. Tall, stately, slow-pacing Moors from the north-west coast; white-turbaned Turks from the eastern gate of the Mediterranean; thick-lipped, and woolly-headed negroids from the African interior; quick-eyed, gesticulating Levantine Greeks; gabardined Jews, and black-wimpled Jewesses; Spanish smugglers, and Spanish sailors; “rock-scorpions,” and red-coated English soldiers – all these compose, without completing, the motley moving crowd that throngs the main street of Gibraltar in the forenoon, and gathers densest of all in the market near Commercial Square.

      It is hardly then as a fortress, but rather as a great entrepôt of traffic, that Gibraltar first presents itself to the newly-landed visitor. He is now too close beneath its frowning batteries and dominating walls of rock to feel their strength and menace so impressive as at a distance; and the flowing tide of many-colored life around him overpowers the senses and the imagination alike. He has to seek the outskirts of the town on either side in order to get the great Rock again, either physically or morally, into proper focus. And even before he sets out to try its height and steepness by the ancient, if unscientific, process of climbing it – nay, before he even proceeds to explore under proper guidance its mighty elements of military strength – he will discover perhaps that sternness is not its only feature. Let him stroll round in the direction of the race-course to the north of the Rock, and across the parade-ground, which lies between the town and the larger area on which the reviews and field-day evolutions take place, and he will not complain of Gibraltar as wanting in the picturesque. The bold cliff, beneath which stands a Spanish café, descends in broken and irregular, but striking, lines to the plain, and it is fringed luxuriantly from stair to stair with the vegetation of the South. Marching and counter-marching under the shadow of this lofty wall, the soldiers show from a little distance like the tin toys of the nursery, and one knows not whether to think most of the physical insignificance of man beside the brute bulk of Nature, or of the moral – or immoral – power which has enabled him to press into his service even the vast Rock which stands there beetling and lowering over him, and to turn the blind giant into a sort of Titanic man-at-arms.

      Such reflections as these, however, would probably whet a visitor’s desire to explore the fortifications without delay; and the time for that is not yet. The town and its buildings have first to be inspected; the life of the place, both in its military and – such as there is of it – its civil aspect, must be studied; though this, truth to tell, will not engage even the minutest observer very long. Gibraltar is not famous for its shops, or remarkable, indeed, as a place to buy anything, except tobacco, which, as the Spanish Exchequer knows to its cost (and the Spanish Customs’ officials on the frontier too, it is to be feared, their advantage), is both cheap and good. Business, however, of all descriptions is fairly active, as might be expected, when we recollect that the town is pretty populous for its size, and numbers some 20,000

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