The Car of Destiny
Beyond that silver barrier lay chaos, a chaos of wild mountains, deep
chasms, and grim steppes, solitary, unpeopled, forbidding under the moon!
If we broke an axle here, with leagues to walk to the nearest farm, there
was no hope of Granada to-morrow. And now the road was equally well fitted
for breaking axles, necks, and hearts.
It was made of rock in petrified waves, among which the Gloria floundered
and buck-jumped as long ago Dick had expected her to do when she crossed
the Spanish border. Every part of her shivered as though she were a horse
in the bull-ring, and I pitied her as if she had a nerve in every spring
and chain.
“This is no road; it’s a nightmare,” groaned Dick. But if it were, it was
a nightmare which ran with us glaring, showing frightful fangs, for mile
after mile of horror. Just as the steep slope of a descent offered a
softer cushion for the suffering tyres, and hope stirred within us, we
broke into such a region as imagination pictures in the streets of Lisbon
after the great earthquake. Gullies and vertical rifts scored the highway
serpentining hither and thither, the chasms gaping to swallow the Gloria
or at least bite off a wheel.
Now the earthy lip of a cleft would crumble and fall in as our
driving-wheels skimmed along the edge; now, steer with all the nerve and
nicety I might, the Gloria would rock as she hung half over a gully.
Somehow I coaxed her down the hill, and driving out from the labyrinth of
crevasses, I breathed a sigh of relief. But the next instant, I had only
time to jam on the brakes to save the car from vaulting into a small river
which ran across the road. Carefully embanked on either side, the stream
flowed swiftly, cutting the descent at right angles.
Whatever the depth might prove, I had to risk it. Mounting the nearer
embankment, I drove down into the running water, where the moon laughed up
at me as I broke her glittering reflection.
“Good old San Cristóbal!” cried Dick as we came through without damage and
climbed the opposite bank, to plump down a breakneck descent on the other
side.
But it was early still to praise the saint. We had only to look ahead to
see how much more he had to do for us, if we were to win through to
Granada at all. Where a little clump of houses had assembled at the bottom
of the hill, as if to watch our struggle, another and far broader river
flowed.
It also raced across the highway, as if roads were made for river-beds;
and this time the situation was so serious that I stopped the Gloria to
reflect.
There was no doubt about it; this river was deep. Though a cart might ford
it safely, and have the flood of rippling silver no higher than the axles,
it was different with an automobile. I wondered bleakly what would happen
to the silencer if its mass of heated metal were suddenly plunged into
cold water, and what would happen to the commutator.
“When in doubt, play a trump,” said Dick. “And I guess that camel-backed
bridge is a trump, if it’s only a knave—or the deuce.”
It was true, there was a narrow erection which might pass as a bridge, if
one wished to pay a compliment. It was of stone, and came to a steep point
at the apex, like a “card tent” when two cards receive support from one
another. It was the question of a fraction of an inch, if the Gloria were
to squeeze over; but between the danger of a jam and the danger of a burst
cylinder, I decided to risk playing Dick’s trump.
First I got out and unscrewed the wheel-caps to give more clearance, then
in again for the trial, while Dick walked, ready to offer aid if it were
needed. I had rasped through to the top, and the Gloria had actually
started on the down grade, when she gave a grinding scream, and stuck
between the parapets.
I tried to move, and could not. The car was hopelessly jammed.
“Nice fix,” said Dick. “If I was writing a book, I’d say, ‘this route only
suitable for hundred horse-power cars, built in small sections, and
carrying cheerful passengers.’ Now, we were cheerful once—and may be
again. Chuck me over the key of the tool-box, will you?”
I did so without a word, lest if I uttered any they should be too strong.
But curiosity overcame me when I heard a metallic chinking, then the blows
of a hammer.
“Only knocking down a bit of this old parapet,” was the calm answer to my
question. “Some of it’s gone already; why not more? I bet future
generations will thank me—as it’s certain never to be mended.”
As he spoke, there was a great splash, when a piece of the parapet,
already weakened by years of storm and stress, plumped over into the
river. The car was released, and slid down the other slope of the camel’s
back.
Now it did seem that we might safely thank San Cristóbal, since nothing
could well be worse than the pass from which he had just delivered us,
scratched, bruised, yet unbroken. We had but to scramble out of the rough
river-bed, bump over the level crossing of a railway, to come out upon a
broad, smooth highway like a road to paradise. Ready to shout with joy, I
put on speed, and the Gloria sprinted over the white and silent way as if
she were happy to turn her back upon Inferno.
Yesterday’s study of the map assured me that at length we had struck the
main road from Malaga, and there seemed every reason to believe that the
ordeal just over would be our last. Flying along at a good fifty miles an
hour, under a tired moon that sought the west, presently a town rose
grandly up before us, throned on rocks in a wide valley, and pallid in the
strange light as some sad queen.
Loja, tragically lost key of Granada, sister of famed Alhama, stronghold
of that fierce alcayde who called Boabdil’s sultana daughter! Loja, and
only thirty miles more to Granada.
We rushed towards that wide valley, and on to the mountain town which
dared to repulse Ferdinand. In the deserted streets the only sound was the
singing of many springs, the same musical voices, the same strains that
Lord Rivers heard close upon five hundred years ago, when he came with his
English archers to help conquer the wild place. El Gran Capitán, too, had
come here, a lonely exile, after all his splendid services to an
ungrateful king. He, too, had heard the singing of Loja’s springs, not in
triumph, but in sorrow.
Down in the valley beyond, the river cried a warning to us; but we did not
heed, even when the road surface changed again to gluey mud; squelching
on, mile after mile, at the best pace we could, and saying always that
soon we should be on the Vega. So the dawn stole up and quivered on the
snows of the Sierra Nevada.
The moon was gone, and it must still be long before the sun would shine
over the mountains, when a black shadow like a great coffin deserted on
the road, gave me pause. I pulled up in haste, only just in time, and
could hardly believe I saw aright. But there was no illusion. We were on
the highway from the port of Malaga to Granada, yet here was a broken
bridge, a noble structure which should have outworn centuries, tumbling
into ruin.
The fall of the great central arch was no new thing, for moss and lichen
enamelled its jagged edges with green and gold. Some branches loosely
strewn across the road were the only signposts indicating this tragedy,
though perhaps it was a story as old as the great earthquake of
two-and-twenty years ago.
A yard or so more and we should have been over; but San Cristóbal had not
forgotten us; and the next thing was, how to cross the river without a
bridge. I turned and went back, discovering wheel-tracks which showed an
obscure bye-path dipping over the edge of the embankment. I followed, and
beheld the ford, a little farther on in a baby forest, where a broad
stream lay in flood between low banks.
“We’ll have to get through,” I said, and drove the Gloria into the water.
If there should be mud—but there were stones instead; and with tiny waves
swishing among the spokes of her wheels she set out to rumble over.
“I believe she’ll do it—” I had begun, when she gave a great hiss, as when
a blacksmith plunges a red-hot horseshoe into water; and a cloud of steam
gushed up. Still I forced her on, expecting each instant to hear some
fatal crash, while we plunged deeper into the stream. Now the little waves
splashed coldly across my feet. Would they mount to the carburetor, spoil
the ignition, or, still worse, would they crack the cylinders?
Neither of us spoke, and the car stormed on, sobbing. For a moment she
clawed in vain at something, and then stumbled, as if on her knees, up the
farther bank. Dripping water and puffing steam she climbed to the
high-road again, and, with a bound, started on through spouting mud, as if
nothing had happened. One would have thought her fired by some incentive
as powerful as mine, which forced her on in the face of all difficulties;
and perhaps it was a song of gladness which the motor hummed, as she came
out upon the Vega.
Suddenly the first beams of the sun streamed down the white slopes of the
far Sierra Nevada, touched the vast fertile plain, and wrought magic with
a castled hill which floated up, dreamlike, from a purple haze where a
great city lay asleep. Clustering vermilion towers blazed with the gold of
dawn, and dazzled our eyes with the glamour of romance. For the sleeping
city was Granada, and the red towers and gardens on the castled hill were
the towers and gardens of the Alhambra.
The adventure was over. And under one of those roofs, dove-grey in the
dawn, I hoped that Monica was sleeping.
XXXVI
WILES AND ENCHANTMENTS
In spite of dykes and dams, said Dick, we had arrived at a place to visit
which had once seemed to him as wonderful as finding the key of the
rainbow. Yet here we were; and Granada—after we had entered at last by
crossing still another river—came out from under its spell of enchantment
when we saw it at close quarters. Only that wonderful hill above was
magical still, as magical to the eye as when Ibraham the astrologer
decreed its gardens.
More than half the miradored Moorish houses had given place to modern
French ones; and descendants of the banished owners in far Tetuan and
Tunis, might as well fling their keys and title-deeds away.
The dome of Isabella’s cathedral and the towers of old, old churches rose
from among the roofs of commonplace streets; ordinary shops of yesterday
and to-day ran up the steep hill towards the Alhambra; but at a great
gateway—la Puerta de las Granadas, raised by Charles the Fifth—the
centuries opened and let us drive through into the past.
At this hour of the morning, the deep green forest of the Alhambra park,
beyond the classic arch, was still as the enchanted wood which hid from
the world the Sleeping Beauty in her palace. The nightingales had gone to
sleep, and the daylight birds had finished their first concert, but
another voice was singing, the joyous high soprano of water—water unseen,
rippling through subterranean channels; water seen tumbling in crystal
runnels on either side of the road in its bubbling way downhill.
Still we saw nothing of the enchanted vermilion towers which draw all the
world across sea and land. There was but a glimpse of ruddy battlements
once at a turn of the road, through a netting of trees and branches; then
we were in a green cutting in the deep wood, where two pleasant,
old-fashioned hotels faced each other.
We were expected at the house named after that delicate and genial soul
who awoke Europe and America to the charm of the Alhambra. I had hopefully
telegraphed from Ronda that we would arrive early, _en automobile_;
nevertheless, the landlord, knowing the route, was smilingly surprised to
see us.
There was a telegram; that was the first thing we learned; and it was from