The Rulers of the Mediterranean. Richard Harding Davis
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the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work throw such deep shadows, or that there are such high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and mysterious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or shops with such queer signs, or walls plastered with such odd-colored placards—streets where every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly appear from narrow alleyways and cry "Halt, there!" at you, and then "All's well" as you pass by.
Gibraltar has one main street running up and clinging to the side of the hill from the principal quay to the most southern point of the Rock. Houses reach up to it from the first level of the ramparts, and continue on up the hill from its other side. On this street are the bazars of the Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish cafés, and the cathedral, and the hotels, and the Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty-four hours. But the color and tone of the street are military. There are soldiers at every step—soldiers carrying the mail or bearing reports, or soldiers in bulk with a band ahead, or soldiers going out to guard the North Front, where lies the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to play football; soldiers in two or threes, with their sticks under their arms, and their caps very much cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these make slow progress, for there is always an officer in sight—either a boy officer just out from England riding to the polo field near the Neutral Ground, or a commanding officer in a black tunic and a lot of ribbons across his breast, or an officer of the day with his sash and sword; and each of these has to be saluted. This is an interesting spectacle, and one that is always new. You see three soldiers coming at you with a quick step, talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and suddenly the upper part of their three bodies becomes rigid, though their legs continue as before, apparently of their own volition, and their hands go up and their pipes and grins disappear, and they pass you with eyes set like dead men's eyes, and palms facing you as though they were trying to learn which way the wind was blowing. This is due, you discover, to the passing of a stout gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his rattan stick in the air in reply. Sometimes when he salutes the soldier stops altogether, and so his walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty yards. It takes an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar one hour to walk ten minutes.
Everybody walks in the middle of the main street in Gibraltar, because the sidewalks are only two feet wide, and because all the streets are as clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow wood and diligences with jangling bells and red worsted harness gallop through this street and sweep the people up against the wall, and long lines of goats who leave milk in a natural manner at various shops tangle themselves up with long lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, with which the local police struggle valiantly. All of these things, troops and goats and yellow cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests with curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats and Tommies in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the main street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a mask ball.
Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the key to the Mediterranean, you can see but the little that lies open to you and to every one along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works of the place you are not allowed to have even a guess. The ramparts stretch all along the western side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high shelving wall which twists and changes its front at every hundred yards, and in such an unfriendly way that whoever tried to scale its slippery surface at one point would have a hundred yards of ramparts on either side of him, from which two sides gunners and infantry could observe his efforts with comfort and safety to themselves; and from which, when tired of watching him slip and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would blow him into bits. But they would probably save him the trouble of coming so far by doing that before he left his vessel in the bay. The northern face of the Rock—that end which faces Spain, and which makes the head of the crouching lion—shows two long rows of teeth cut in its surface by convicts of long ago. You are allowed to walk through these dungeons, and to look down upon the Neutral Ground and the little Spanish town at the end of its half-mile over the butts of great guns. And you will marvel not so much at the engineering skill of whoever it was who planned this defence as at the weariness and the toil of the criminals who gave up the greater part of their lives to hewing and blasting out these great galleries and gloomy passages, through which your footsteps echo like the report of cannon.
Lower down, on the outside of this mask of rock, are more ramparts, built there by man, from which infantry could sweep the front of the enemy were they to approach from the only point from which a land attack is possible. The other side of the Rock, that which faces the Mediterranean, is unfortified, except by the big guns on the very summit, for no man could scale it, and no ball yet made could shatter its front. To further protect the north from a land attack there is at the base of the Rock and below the ramparts a great moat, bridged by an apparently solid piece of masonry. This roadway, which leads to the north gate of the fortress—the one which is closed at six each night—is undermined, and at a word could be blown into pebbles, turning the moat into a great lake of water, and virtually changing the Rock of Gibraltar into an island. I never crossed this roadway without wondering whether the sentry underneath might not be lighting his pipe near the powder-magazine, and I generally reached the end of it at a gallop.
There is still another protection to the North Front. It is only the protection which a watch-dog gives at night; but a watch-dog is most important. He gives you time to sound your burglar-alarm and to get a pistol from under your pillow. A line of sentries pace the Neutral Ground, and have paced it for nearly two hundred years. Their sentry-boxes dot the half-mile of turf, and their red coats move backward and forward night and day, and any one who leaves the straight and narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and who comes too near, passes a dead-line and is shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the white adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of sentries, wearing long blue coats and queer little shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so the two great powers watch each other unceasingly across the half-mile of turf, and say, "So far shall you go, and no farther; this belongs to me." There is nothing more significant than these two rows of sentries; you notice it whenever you cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain. First you see the English sentry, rather short and very young, but very clean and rigid, and scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with pipe-clay and his boots with blacking, and his arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is a little atom, a molecule; but he is complete in himself, with his food and lodging on his back, and his arms ready to his hand. He is one of a great system that obtains from India to Nova Scotia, and from Bermuda to Africa and Australia; and he shows that he knows this in the way in which he holds up his chin and kicks out his legs as he tramps back and forward guarding the big rock at his back. And facing him, half a mile away, you will see a tall handsome man seated on a stone, with the tails of his long coat wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his gun leaning against another rock while he rolls a cigarette; and then, with his hands in his pockets, he gazes through the smoke at the sky above and the sea on either side, and wonders when he will be paid his peseta a day for fighting and bleeding for his country. This helps to make you understand how six thousand half-starved Englishmen held Gibraltar for four years against the army of Spain.
This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar as a fortress. You hear, of course, of much more, and you can guess at a great deal. Up above, where the Signal Station is, and where no one, not even an officer in uniform not engaged on the works, is allowed to go, are the real fortifications. What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted gray, or a tree hides the mouth of another. And in this forbidden territory are great cannon which are worked from the lowest ramparts. These are the present triumphs of Gibraltar. Before they came, the clouds which shut out the sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world from its summit rendered the great pieces of artillery there as useless in bad weather as they are harmless in times of peace. The very elements threatened to war against the English, and a shower of rain or a veering wind might have altered the fortunes