Alcántara is one of the most God-forsaken places in the world. Pigs walk the ill-kept streets, and the vast buildings of the monkish-knights who formerly guarded the frontier pass are crumbling into such universal ruin that the lanes are a mass of broken rubbish. They are not romantic ruins, but depressing and almost terrifying. When we climbed down the precipitous hill that led to the bridge, our shoes were cut to pieces by the flinty stones.
And the bridge, that lode-star of our pilgrimage, worth going five hundred miles to see! We thought with exasperation of the sixty we were wasting on it. No doubt Trajan did build it eighteen centuries ago, but they have chipped off the beautiful gray toning of ages, filled in with mortar the boulders after they had stood unaided till our time, and made a modern boulevard from Portugal. All solitude and sublimity are well eliminated from the scene. We sat on the benches of that banal little park and glared at the disappointing thing. The Tagus, Lope de Vega's _hidalgo Tajo_, was here a low stream, yellow with mud, flowing beneath bleak, unimposing hills. The bridge, in spite of its two hundred feet of height, did not appear as high as the aqueduct at Mérida, an effect due probably to the arches standing on stilts. And it may sound blatant, but a memory of once passing under that superb thing the Brooklyn Bridge, at dawn, made this ancient monument suffer in comparison. The ludicrousness of our having traveled out of our way to see this sight struck us at last, and when we recalled the Cáceres landlord's astonishment, and that of Brazilian friends at Seville who had tried to persuade us our Estremadura plan was quite mad, we too burst into a hearty laugh, soon sobered at the prospect of the next day's weary return to Arroyo. We climbed back to the inn and dined on _glasses_ of coffee.
The following morning, after some more glasses of our only modus vivendi, we explored the decayed town. In it is a pearl of architecture built by the Benedictine knights in 1506, the now ruined church of San Benito, with lofty slender piers, one of the most gracefully proportioned of semi-Renaissance things. Truly was the transition from Gothic to Renaissance a most harmonious moment in Spanish architecture. This interesting discovery could not do away with the fever and cold of the awful drive back to Arroyo. Such petty miseries are best passed over. More dead than alive, late the second night we reached again the comfortable hotel at Cáceres, where we were glad to pause a few days to pick up strength to push on.