on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy affair yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for the soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its ruins a vigour, a clearness by which the least energetic characters acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral springing towards the sky, its alcázars and palaces that only take sight from their invisible patios. Thus secret and inflexible, in this harsh overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in solitude, a cry in the desert.”

The train leaves you at the foot of the town before the quaint fortressed bridge of Alcántara. In these days of unpretentious exits and entrances, when we scarcely detect the outskirts of a city from the open way, or the suburbs from the heart of urban movement, these two castellated bridges, by which you enter and leave Toledo, have a strange and insistent air of feudality that at once captures fancy, and resembles the flourish of trumpets in martial dramas. Civilisation instantly waves backward, and leaves imagination thrilled upon the shores of legend. At a bound memory is at the core of troubled Spanish history, a sad and spectral ghost, in the thrall of wonderment and admiration. Surely never was town, with all our modern needs of bread-winning and competition, of commerce and politics, of cheap ambition and every-day social intercourse, so curiously, magnificently faithful to its past. So precisely must Toledo have looked, barring the electric light, when the last page of its intimate history was written. Just so brown and barren, with its front of unflinching austerity, its stern wealth of architecture, the air of romantic elegance and charmed slumber it breathes upon sadness, with its look of legendary musing and widowed remembrance. So, unchanged, must it have been in its great day of hieratic glory, of Gothic rule, of Saracen triumph and of feudal revolt.

PUENTE DE ALCANTARA

From the bridges, the road winds up the steep rock, upon whose summit this unique old city is built. The views at every turn of the winding path are entrancing. There is every strange effect to gratify the eager eye in search of the picturesque: an unsurpassed boldness of site, from the wide zone of the Tagus to the point of the Cathedral tower pinnacled against the upper arch of heaven. Project high rocks upon which odd and delightful passages, neither street nor lane, full of colour and curve and varied line, are cut like sharp upward and downward strokes, over frowning ravines, and swelling by swift ascent from the yellow band of water below, that imprisons the town like a moat, and along with the martial bridges, give the impression of being cut off from the big lively world, a prisoner in a city of dreamland. At once you yield yourself to the gracious grip of your enchanter and gaoler. The eye rests in ineffable contentment upon the violent line of empty hills, yellow and brown and rose, turned violet by the sun’s retreat, and you feel no longing for the vulgar and bustling present you have left behind. Here to sit awhile and dream, not days but unending months, in the shadow of a mighty cathedral, in what a Spanish writer with Iberian imagery, has called “a case of mediæval jewels.” It is a fitting note of environment that the landscape should be stamped by an ardent and ineffaceable desolation, incessantly exposed to devastating winds, swept by fierce rains and blinding dust and remorseless sunfire. Nature is neither instigated by contrast, nor softened by charm. Unsmiling in its arid austerity, it is grand by the magic of its simplicity. The audacity with which it reveals its nakedness in the glare of unshaded light that has burnt its flanks a peculiar reddish-brown hue, sinks all impression of crudity, and becomes the supreme effect of natural art. It makes no pretence to shield the peril of its broken precipices with the beguilement of verdure, but lets them hack their murderous way to the river-brim without shrub or any vigorous sign of vegetation. Heavy and still, like the glittering light that fatigues the eye, it has nevertheless its secret, matchless captivation, such as Venice, its sister-town in strangeness (though of softer and more alluring beauty, feminine to its stern masculine), and casts the mind, conquered, into the mazes of reverie. You may have come by a train into this mausoleum of petrified memories, you may sit at the usual table d’hôte, but you cannot feel modern: the present slips away, and forgotten is the march of centuries.

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Of the town’s earliest history knowledge is merely the wildest assumption, and we have no reason to believe any of the legends handed down to us by historians as tradition. For instance, that obscure if venerable voice, asserts, that when God made the sun he placed it over Toledo (previously made, of course) and planted the foot of Adam, first King, beneath it at that particular spot of the globe. This is at least a fine testimony of the Spaniard’s lofty faith in the antiquity of Toledo. A less sweeping assertion connects the first light of the town with Tubal, the grandson of Noah, who is supposed to have come hither after the deluge, and this view is naïvely supported by the verses of Gracia Dei, the chronicler of King Pedro:

Alphonsus the Learned, in his Cronica General, maintains and is supported in his no less extravagant opinion by Diego Mossem Valera, Isabel the Catholic’s historian, that Toledo was founded by Pyrrhus, captain of the army of Cyrus, and son-in-law of King Hispan, father of Iberia. It is imagined that Iberia, Pyrrhus’s wife, was in need of the freshness and verdure of the leafy banks of the Tagus, and that her husband brought her hither to taste the air and delights of the gardens around. But we are not told how there came to be gardens and foliaged places along the silent Tagus, nor who fashioned them, nor how Pyrrhus heard of them. The wife, Iberia, and the father-in-law appear as adequate explanations of the subsequent history of Spain, since both furnish the names of the land that Europe is familiar with. Once upon the banks of the Tagus, the gardens did not content Pyrrhus, so he began to enlarge the spot he had chosen. He discovered two towers, one at San Roman, and the other at the Alcázar, called Los Dos Hermanos, (The Two Brothers), built, tradition then told him, by the two sons of King Rocas in defence against the enemies of Rocas and his father Tartus. But whence came Rocas and Tartus and the two brothers? Why should Alphonso the Learned choose Pyrrhus and his wife, those remote tourists, as the founders of Toledo, rather than Rocas and Tartus?

Rufo Festo Avieno regards Hercules as the founder of the Carpetanian city, and celebrates the achievement in verse: