LARAICHE AND CADIZ

There are one or two physical factors in the making up of Europe and Barbary which have quite definitely and clearly moulded history: we can talk of them as real factors in the story of our civilisation, not after the fashion of the popular modern guess-work, but with certitude. For instance, there is the wide area of marsh to which the town of Pinsk gives its name, and which, more than anything else except the human factor of the Mongol invasion, has separated the Russian from the Western culture. Here, in the South, is the Riff.

To the south of Spain, beyond the sea, over against the Andalusian coasts, stands the Riff; such a tangle of mountains, such difficult ground for fighting over, as is not to be found anywhere else in North Africa or upon our continent. It extends in a forbidding, impossible band, cutting off the interior of Morocco from the Mediterranean, inhabited from the beginning by tribes unsubdued. The Roman organisation which was able to hold all the tangle of the Eastern Alps and the labyrinth of Albania, failed, or rather did not attempt, the control of that belt. No one has ever held the Riff, not even the Sultan seated in Marrakesh; or in Fez close at hand.

To the south of it runs that easy trench by which the fertile Barbary of the east—Algiers and Tunis—communicates with the fertile Barbary of the west, of the Atlantic coast; it is the trench Oudja—Taza—Fez, which has always been the road from the Mediterranean to the ocean, and which to-day the French have linked up again with a railway and with a wide military road.

As you go along this famous highway (which was also that of the first Mohammedan cavalry when they came in to destroy the relics of Rome), you have on either side great lifting mountains and the broad depression which forms a natural channel for traffic in between. The mountains to your left, to the south, are the first ramparts of the Atlas. Those to the north are the first foothills of the Riff. It has been the fate of modern Spain that this worst of all territories has fallen within her zone of government in the partition of Morocco, and therein lies the truth of that expression I have used, the ‘running sore’ of Morocco; that is, what long seemed the perpetual, and apparently fruitless, drain of the ceaseless Moroccan war.

No other country in Europe lay under a handicap of this kind; nor will the foreign observer understand the first elements of it if he thinks this war a piece of purposeless aggression, a painting of the map. There was nothing of that in the debated and anxious Moroccan policy of Spain. If the Riff could be left alone (as it has been British policy to leave alone, as a rule, the tangle of Afghan mountains), the Moroccan problem would not exist. But there stand upon the Mediterranean coast, below those mountains, the very ancient Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla. They are not only an integral part of Spain and of her civilisation, they are of standing and importance in themselves. For Ceuta there was perhaps little direct peril; for Melilla more. But all that coast was involved, and Tetuan as well.

They are not only of importance in themselves, they are also of importance to the whole European position in Barbary; and their neighbourhood is always open to peril as things stand to-day. That is the heart of the Moroccan problem.

There is much else, of course; there is the tradition of twelve hundred years, all one conflict between the Spanish people and Moors. The modern reader smiles when he hears that the keys of Seville and of Toledo and of Cordova are still treasured in certain Moroccan houses, but the thing is a symbol; nor is it without significance that the Tower of Hassan outside Rabat answers to the Giralda of Seville in pattern, in character, in spirit. There is further that element which enters into all such problems: the difficulty of retirement; the sound principle applicable not to all, but to nearly all, national tasks—that to abandon them would prove a worse evil than to continue the strain of them. There are these and many other considerations; but the chief one still remains what I have said: a defensive problem connected with the ancient Spanish towns of that coast.

If proof were needed that Spain had here a task of quite especial difficulty, it would be afforded by the content and prosperity of all that part of her zone which lies in the plain westward, beyond the mountains: that open country through which runs the communication from Tangier to the interior: which will also carry the main road and the railway from north to south whenever, or if ever, the conflict of interests which meet at the Straits is resolved.

In this sea-plain, where also one of the last great battles between the Christians and the Mohammedans was fought out at the end of the Middle Ages (to the disaster of the Crown of Portugal), all now goes well; and you will not find along that coast any more well-appointed, cleanly little town than Laraiche, its port. As a port it is hampered by a very shallow bar, the mouth of the River Kus; but its good government shows itself in its external aspect, which is everywhere orderly. A man coming into Morocco by this entry might well wonder why the occupation had become a by-word for anxiety and strain, for here all is at peace and all is flourishing. It seems also to have a natural bond with the coast of Cadiz, which lies opposite, at a distance comparable to the crossings of the English Channel, a matter of some hundred miles, most of which is coastwise running.

It was from this little port that I sailed over to Cadiz, which hitherto I had not known. It was a long, slow passage over the enormous Atlantic rollers, the last effects of a strong on-shore gale which had died down the day before. We crossed the bar with the afternoon high tide, and, after anchoring outside for a little while, the vessel steered north, and, as darkness fell, one could see, long spaces apart, the rare lights of habitation upon the African shore.

Our course took us gradually further and further from that coast on a line slowly diverging, but as we came abreast of the Straits, the great light on Spartel, the corner headland of Africa, shone brightly, and even seemed close at hand through the clear air. We caught soon afterwards the flash of the lighthouse at Trafalgar, and, with the last of a short night, we slipped in through the tortuous passage of the outer roads by which one turns round eastward into the sheltered Bay of Cadiz.

I know not what the roots may be of that strong emotion which a man feels when he knows that he is touching the actual soil, seeing the very earth, on which very ancient things have been done. It is, in my experience at least, a combined emotion of travel and of history separate from all others; a particular and special affection.

As we threaded into Cadiz Haven between the coloured lights of the channel buoys, I felt this strong emotion more than I have felt it before anywhere; it was heightened, I suppose, by the night and the long vigil, and that first turn of the dawn which changes all things. Thus did I come in to the inner shelter of Cadiz, and they let go the anchor, and the ship swung to the slight flood tide. That same tide did the first inquirers from the inland tideless sea come to study curiously in the days when the outer ocean had no further shore and was a sort of eternity surrounding this world.

This place where I lay was the first of all the outer ports of the West to be known and used by civilised men. And throughout certainly three thousand years, and as much longer as you will, it has kept its name and even its form. Its name, which, they say (it is but a guess), may have meant something in the Phœnician tongue like a ‘stronghold,’ has come down unchanged in Latin, Spanish, and Arabic, through all these generations. The form of Cadiz has not changed either, because, by a happy accident, Cadiz cannot grow. It wholly fills that almost insular site at the end of the long, exceedingly narrow spit of land which forms the natural breakwater of the harbour. Its walls, so often ruined, stand where they stood when Hercules first traced them, and the land gate is, and must always be, on one unchanging site. Cadiz is always of its nature a city on an island, and also a city more entirely of the sea in its traditions and changing fates than any other—more even than Venice. Though it was the last refuge of national government in the resistance to Napoleon it never attempted to govern the mainland. It has ever lived wholly by its harbour. Its alternate wealth and decline have gone with nothing but the alternate growth and lessening of its ships.

It is not without irony that this, the very oldest site in Spain, has, of all ancient Spanish cities, the least remains of antiquity. That is partly due to its later activity and partly to its being a sort of maritime outpost, vulnerable from the sea, filled with commercial activity and peril. At the end of the sixteenth century an English expedition sacked and burned it, and a further fire necessitated its rebuilding. It was rebuilt in regular fashion, as all towns are when they are planned of one piece, in whatever age—unless we except the rebuilding of London, in the next century; and even there very regular plans were laid out by Wren and by Temple. But vested interests were too strong for them, and the old London labyrinth (let us rejoice!) was restored.

Cadiz was rebuilt after a fashion which it is difficult to judge either as insipid or as interesting or as curious: it has been called all these things. It is insipid compared with the intense vitality of the Spanish continuous work, alive with all the past, in city after city of Spanish pride. It is of curious interest compared with any town not Spanish because of the very tall houses, the narrow lanes—narrow for protection from the sun and narrow because the space was so naturally limited—the little turret-like ornaments at the cornets of the houses, the swelling of the whole thing up from its walls. All these are curious. Yet I will maintain that the profound interest of Cadiz is not in its whiteness upon the sea wherein, from some way off, you see it reflected very vividly during dead calms; still less is it in the town’s rather meaningless eighteenth-century additions; nor even in the immemorial oval of its league of wall; nor in the great legend of Hercules; but the profound interest of Cadiz lies rather in that secure Bay, the first of the Atlantic harbours.

In a sense you may say that Spain, here in Cadiz, was the mother of all our modern things and of all our looking westward. Cadiz was the first great tidal harbour, filled with the ebb and the flow of the Atlantic and linking us up with the New World.

I have often wished that, in order to make the story complete, Columbus had sailed from Cadiz instead of that little anchorage of Saltes, just down the coast, which has filched from Cadiz an immortal memory. Yet Cadiz reaped the fruits of that journey, and Cadiz rose and fell thenceforward with the monopoly or the loss, the productivity or the slackness, of the American trade. This it was which made it the victim of foreign attack. This it was which gave it its vast wealth in the last period of its power. This it was which let it sink again in the mid-nineteenth century. This it is which in part has restored it to-day.

Only in part; for the trade of the world in our great modern ships now seeks Barcelona. But Cadiz is the natural entry from the western sea. It has not the same pride of arms as you will find in the battling cities of the north. It fell naturally to the Reconquest after the middle of the thirteenth century. It has few legends of resistance to the Mohammedan power, and, although you will find Hercules and the two lions carven above its gates, it is commercial rather than knightly. But it is the gate from the broad ocean and from the West, and, alone of the Spanish cities, it looks directly, uninterruptedly, over its western horizon at the New Spain beyond.