Martin A. S. Hume

“ And still the road lies mainly upward through the keen pure air, the mountain slopes below and around us green with pine forests, and above us the eternal grey granite boulders. The land is bathed in a flood of sunlight, with here and there upon the widespread slopes and valleys the dark shadow of a passing cloud. Even up here amidst the masses of granite the fruit-laden vine persists, covering and embracing with its reaching tendrils poplars, oaks, and olives on the sheltered slopes, whilst the proud pines alone, towering on the exposed surfaces, defy the creeper’s insidious caress. ”

“ Upon this rise the beautiful fluted columns of granite, with bases and carved capitals of white marble, the granite entablature over the pillars being almost perfect.
At what was the entrance of the temple the remains of a noble flight of steps, the whole width of the edifice and twelve feet high, exist, and it requires no effort of the imagination, turning one’s back to the cathedral, to repeople the space before us with figures of the long past. Up the steps to the lovely temple under the blue sky mount the white-clad citizens of imperial Rome. ”

“ Evora stands upon a gentle eminence in the midst of a vast fertile plain, surrounded by distant mountains, and upon the very summit of the hill, hidden away between narrow, winding streets leading up from the main arcaded praça, stands the venerable Sé—the cathedral of the archbishopric. In a quiet little open space it rears its two solid, square, granite Romanesque towers of the twelfth century, flanked by the whitewashed, monastic-looking palace of the archbishop, the two towers being united by a pure Gothic doorway porch which fills the space between them. ”

“ Here is a smart schooner hailing from the Cornish port of Fowey, from which stockfish from Newfoundland is being landed on the heads of women, flat salt slabs as hard and dry as wood, but good nutritious food for all that; and farther along, with their prows to the shore, rest a dozen un-ladened wine and fruit boats from up the Douro, and flat-bottomed passenger skiffs into which women and men with baskets and bundles, representing their week’s supplies purchased in Oporto, are crowding to be carried back to their homes in the rich vineyard villages miles up the river. ”

“ As we near Coimbra, though it is not much past noon, we meet many groups of handsome country women, with, as usual, heavy burdens upon their heads, returning home from the weekly market in the city. Barefooted they go invariably, with their fine broad shoulders, full bosoms, classical faces, and broad, low brows, their gay kerchiefs on head and bosom, and their fine eyes gazing straight forth with modest dignity; and mentally I deny assent to the boast of Guimarães that its maids and matrons reign supreme in buxom grace, for those of Coimbra need bow the head to none on earth. ”

“ Huddled in squalor and filth together are half-naked, savage-looking criminals, old men, sturdy vagabonds, and youths almost children, staring out from the gloom of the prison-house through the unglazed barred windows, with whining prayer for charity, ribald jest, or explosive curses. These gaol-birds, herded publicly in their unutterable degradation behind the gratings, form the blackest spot visible in Portuguese life. Even Spain for the most part has brought her prisons into some semblance of civilised order, but Portugal in this one respect lags inexplicably behind. ”

“ A few hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee with the passers-by: at one end of the praça, a lovely ancient Manueline cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the roof, looking like a cross between Kentish oast-houses, and giant champagne bottles. ”

“ I know few more characteristic thoroughfares than the road by the river-side at Oporto, called the Ribeira, which is the centre of maritime activity of the port. The path runs beneath what was the ancient river-wall, now pierced or burrowed out to form caverns of shops, where wine and food, cordage and clothing are sold to sailor men. Many of the open doors have vine trellises before them, in the shade of which quaintly garbed groups forgather, and a constant tide of men and women flows along the path, eddying into and out of the cavernous recesses in the ancient wall. ”

“ Great palms and towering cedars of Lebanon grow side by side with oaks of giant bulk: oranges and fig-trees, cork and acacia, maple, birch, and willow stand beneath the straight eucalyptus, “tall as the mast of some great admiral”: araucarias spread their spiny branches with a luxuriance never seen at home, and mosses, ivy, and ferns clothe thickly every inch of ground, every bank, and even the time-worn stones, that all around testify to the existence of dwelling here long before the white palace raised its tall tower over the darkening wood. ”

“ From the top of the Fonte Fria, or Scala Santa, the path leads through a valley, and then precipitously up the ascent that faced me when on the morning after my arrival I stood upon the battlements for the first time. The hermitage of St. Antão stands upon a ledge high up the slope, a tiny dismantled cell, from which a view is gained on a clear day that fairly takes one’s breath away. Below, set in its vast bed of verdure, the white stone castle stands, the gold armillary sphere that crowns its tower glittering in the sun ”

“ From above them, at hundreds of points all over Cintra, you may command views of gardens of tropical luxuriance; but without permission of the wealthy owners you may not enter them. Cintra’s beauty is not free like the sacred wood of Bussaco, where you may wander at your will through purely sylvan scenery that not even Cintra can surpass. The grandeur of the towering Moorish stronghold on its crest of grey boulders is more imposing than anything Bussaco can show, and the interior of some of the highly cultivated private gardens of Cintra are as fine as any in Europe ”

“ The elaborate high-relief carvings prevalent in Portugal are usually executed in soft marble-like limestone, which hardens with exposure to the air; but here in the Bolsa of Oporto the intricate festoons and ingenious caprices that stand out everywhere in relief on walls, pillars, and staircases are carved out of the solid grey granite of which the edifice is built, as if out of defiance the most difficult material had been sought. ”

“ It is autumn there, no doubt, for the calendar tells us so and cannot lie; but here it is glorious summer still, for the palms and planes wave softly green in the languorous air, and the flowers, in great white and purple masses, hang over every wall and wrestle with the blue-black grapes that deck the trellises before the cottage doors. Everywhere is vivid colour and sharp outline in an atmosphere of marvellous clarity, and as we are carried rapidly through the balmy, voluptuous breeze to the city, we feel that life under such conditions is indeed worth living. ”

“ Here in North Portugal the note struck in the cathedrals is not mystery richly dight, as in Spain, but sincere austerity, and a simple faith so essential in 19the edifice that the grave granite columns and arches appear as unaffected by the heaps, and piles, and masses of curly carved gilt wood around them as a monolith might be by the lizards that bask and slither round its base. Here in Oporto, for instance, the low, massive, granite pillars that line the narrow nave, and support the round romanesque arches, seem sullenly to bid defiance to time and decay; such is their prodigious solidity. ”

“ The library is a gorgeous gilt and over-decorated room in the florid taste of the eighteenth century, the worst possible style for a place of quiet study; and almost the only attractive feature in the exterior of the university is the fine Manueline doorway to the chapel in the great quadrangle. Here twisted cables, rich mouldings, floreated crockets and pinnacles, armillary spheres and crosses, the usual notes of the style, mark the work as being of the period when Portugal was ebullient with feverish energy and ambition. ”

“ For some miles, ever since we had left the main railway 91line from Oporto to Lisbon at Pampilhosa junction, we had been rising, whilst the pines bordering the line had been growing thicker and more sturdy, and from Luzo onward the way grew still steeper. The stars shone brightly, but a dew almost as heavy as rain was falling as the carriage that had met me at the station drawn by two gigantic mules, rattled along the excellent road through Luzo.
There is always a feeling of uncanniness in speeding through an unknown town at night for the first time. ”

“ The vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from the time of the Arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure Moorish, lined with beautiful Arab tiles. Arab tiles, indeed, remain in many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is exquisitely paved with them. There is a beautiful little Moorish patio too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a palace at Fez or Mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. ”

“ All the way from Taipas to Guimarães the road lay through maize fields bordered thickly by vine-covered poplars; a prosperous land of well-fed, laborious people. Near the ancient city, the birthplace of the Portuguese monarchy, the ground rises, and the pine forests spread for miles on the uplands all around, the fresh sweet scent of the woods adding one more sensuous joy to a closing day of incomparable loveliness. ”

“ For a building so late as the end of the fifteenth century, just on the verge of the period that went crazy over the exuberant Manueline, this survival of the Norman-Byzantine tradition is extraordinary.
Evora was all aglow with the glories of the setting sun when I left it. Long lines of lofty eucalyptus trees stretched as far as the eye reached along the railway, the long hanging strips of bark and the bright clean trunks shining a brilliant orange, whilst the drooping foliage was a bright bronze tipped with gold. ”

“ Belem is beautiful and suggestive enough to provide reflection for one day without allowing other impressions to disturb it, and the sordid sights and sounds of the water-side were nothing to me, for the airy fancies of the artist in stone and the romantic memories of the heroic days surrounded me as with a mantle.
Lisbon is a city of prospects, and, uninteresting as are its main streets, it is only necessary to stand upon one of its many eminences to see spread before you a wide and varied panorama. ”

“ It is the sea, the broad Atlantic, with its fringe of silvery sand many miles distant, and it gives the supreme touch to a scene of perfect beauty. On the other side of the castle the view is just as lovely in a different way. Beyond the palms and flowers at the foot, seen over a hundred carved crockets and capricious stone pinnacles and gargoyles, with the great tower of the castle and its armillary sphere over all, is a far stretch of undulating wood ”

“ Sculptured stones, chapels, hermitages, fountains, grottoes, and shrines were all built by their patient hands; paths scarped on steep hillsides, seats placed in quiet nooks for the meditative and the weary, nay, the trees and plants from all lands growing so proudly now had all been tended anxiously by the same dumb shadows that for centuries waited for death within the walls enclosing the sacred wood. If ever a place was haunted by sad, harmless ghosts, these paths of pilgrimage at Bussaco must still be thronged by the white-robed phantoms of those who made them. ”

“ In sylvan beauty, in sweetness and freshness of atmosphere, even in its sublime prospects of mountain, vale, and sea, Bussaco may rival and, in some respects, surpass it; but the long-stretched yellow battlements and massive 228towers piled upon the eternal granite boulders, sheer up a thousand feet and more over the little pleasure-town and its leafy ravines, would be worth the voyage to Portugal alone to see, even though the gardens of the rich were more reserved and exclusive than they are. ”

“ Here and there a straight pine or cedar, more lofty than its fellows, caught with its feathery top a glinting sun-ray and held it, whilst high up, almost overhead, upon a rocky spur emerging from the foliage there stood a humble hermitage, and on the very summit, looking so inaccessible that no human foot could reach it, a little white tower of another hermitage reared its cross over all. ”

“ At the railway station at Braga, in the outskirts of the city, a noisy, assertive little steam-train of several carriages is waiting in the street, and with much puffing and whistling, it carries the travellers up the slope into the narrow thoroughfares of the town. It is Sunday, and the streets are thronged with gaily-dressed people, the women, heavily decked with the ancient gold jewellery, long earrings, heavy neck chains, and crosses upon the white shirt that covers the bosom. ”

“ Here and there amidst the greenery, far below upon the plains, a white cottage, or the clustered red roofs of a village lit up the picture with a note of emphasis, and the sweet, cool air of the mountains, fresh with the scent of pine, eucalyptus, and wild flowers innumerable, came to the jaded town-dweller like a foretaste of some exquisite new sense to endow mankind in a fuller life to come. ”