amped upon
the edge of this horseshoe of earth that embraced the bay. From the
headland of Tarifa to the gates of Gibraltar, a monotonous unity of
race; the happy warbling of the Andalusian dialect; the broad-brimmed
hat; the _mantilla_ about the women's bosoms and the glistening hair
adorned with flowers. On the huge mountain topped by the British flag
and enclosing the oriental part of the bay, a seething cauldron of
races, a confusion of tongues, a carnival of costume: Hindus, Mussulmen,
English, Hebrews, Spanish smugglers, soldiers in red coats, sailors from
every nation, living within the narrow limits of the fortifications,
subjected to military discipline, beholding the gates of the
cosmopolitan sheepfold open with the signal at sunrise and close at the
booming of the sunset gun. And as the frame of this picture, vibrant
with its mingling of color and movement, a range of peaks, the highlands
of Africa, the Moroccan mountains, stretched across the distant horizon,
on the opposite shore of the strait; here is the most crowded of the
great marine boulevards, over whose blue highway travel incessantly the
heavily laden ships of all nationalities and of all flags; black
transatlantic steamers that plow the main in search of the seaports of
the poetical Orient, or cut through the Suez Canal and are lost in the
isle-dotted immensities of the Pacific.

To Aguirre, Gibraltar was a fragment of the distant Orient coming
forward to meet him; an Asiatic port wrenched from its continent and
dragged through the waves to run aground on the coast of Europe, as a
sample of life in remote countries.

He was stopping at a hotel on Royal Street, a thoroughfare that winds
about the mountain,--that vertebral column of the city to which lead,
like thin threads, the smaller streets in ascending or descending slope.
Every morning he was startled from his sleep by the noise of the sunrise
gun,--a dry, harsh discharge from a modern piece, without the
reverberating echo of the old cannon. The walls trembled, the floors
shook, window panes and curtains palpitated, and a few moments later a
noise was heard in the street, growing gradually louder; it was the
sound of a hurrying flock, the dragging of thousands of feet, the buzz
of conversations carried on in a low voice along the closed and silent
buildings. It was the Spanish day laborers arriving from La Linea ready
for week at the arsenal; the farmhands from San Roque and Algeciras who
su