The Mediterranean off the coast of Spain is not always calm. Sometimes the east wind, the _Llevant_, lashes the waves to fury, and the shores along the villages and towns are black with lines of fishing-boats that dare not put out to sea. But for weeks together it is “lulled in the coil of its crystalline streams,” and the sun rises and sets across a silken plain of blue. In such weather a journey along the coast has a wonderful freshness and a fascinating charm. Again and again the traveller recalls the magic of those lines of the old romance:
“Quién hubiese tal ventura, Sobre las aguas del mar, Como hubo el conde Arnaldos, La mañana de San Juan!”
“Oh for a chance as happy, Where the deep sea waters swell, As on the morn of St. John’s Day, Count Arnaldos befel,” etc.
By St. John’s Day, however, the sun flashes its rays too fiercely, and it is in late spring or early autumn that the voyage is most enjoyable. A land journey can give no idea of the loveliness of these coasts, and towns such as Alicante and Almería lose much of their beauty if deprived of their background of mountains, which can only be seen fully out at sea. The sea and sky are unfailingly beautiful, and the life of the ports, full of colour and movement, never loses its interest. Almería, fallen from its ancient greatness, is yet active in its “purple-shadowed bay,”[89] and exports every year two million barrels, a hundred million pounds, of grapes, chiefly to America and England. Torrevieja, further north, is a small town or village of some seven thousand inhabitants, at which steamers touch to take in a cargo of salt, but which the tourist, on his way from Elche to Murcia, rarely turns aside to visit. It has a thoroughly African look, with its flat-roofed, grey-white houses on a bare, level strip of sandy coast, with no trees except palms, that stand conspicuous like trees of the desert; the sand in places is thinly covered with grass, of lightest, almost yellow, green. To the left, seen from the sea, is a long line of gleaming salt, drawn from the sea-water by evaporation under the summer sun, and now ready to be exported. Beyond the line of salt is a distant range of bare mountains, faintly purple. The town has one or two small towers, four factory chimneys, and half a dozen round mills, with arms as slender as the cranes on the loading steamers in the harbour. A continual rosary of barges, yellow, white, green, or black, carries the salt across the bay. The heavy load weighs the barge to the water’s edge, and the glistening white salt seems to float on the blue surface. In the barge, at either end, go as many as twenty or even thirty men, some sitting rowing, others facing them and standing to row, and others punting with their poles of immense length that taper away at the top to the slight girth of a fishing rod. The shirts of the men, mauve, pink, white, red, or purple, their light blue or black coats, red sashes, trousers of velvet or velvet corduroy of many shades, from bright yellow to dark brown, the long shining yellow punt poles, and the white pyramids of salt on the sea of sapphire, combine to form a strange and beautiful sight. The empty barges return high in the water, with little mounds of salt left along their ledges. At midday the houses seem to faint and grow indistinct, the mountains fade to a hardly perceptible outline, only the salt reflects the sun in every facet of its countless grains, and glitters whiter than snow. In the sunset the lines resume their sharpness, and the mountains are grey or blue-grey or intense leaden blue or purple, according to their distances. The Murcian sky is famous for its clear serenity, and the sunsets and sunrises are of surpassing fairness. Alicante, too, which is nearer to Murcia than to Valencia, has a wonderful sky and a wonderful sea, and here, too, the “sunrise is a glorious birth.” “Alicante aux clochers mêle les minarets,” says Victor Hugo in one of the poems of “Les Orientales,” and from the sea Alicante has an Oriental look, with its lines of palms, stories of flat roofs, and bare background of hills and mountains. But it is at evening that Alicante is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The lights shine softly through the four lines of palm-trees along the Paseo de los Mártires, and are reflected across the water; in the harbour the last radiance of evening sets the tracery of masts and cranes and rigging in clear relief. To the west the sea is already dark, almost wine-coloured, the οἲνψ of the Greeks, but in the east it is a most exquisite blue, a blue that seems to be a transparent surface of turquoise covering a layer of white chalk.