The Rulers of the MediterraneanDavis, Richard Harding
History
The Rulers of the Mediterranean
Davis, Richard Harding
Mediterranean Region -- Description and travel
an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar one hour to walk ten minutes.
Everybody walks in the middle of the main street in Gibraltar, because
the sidewalks are only two feet wide, and because all the streets are as
clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow wood and diligences with
jangling bells and red worsted harness gallop through this street and
sweep the people up against the wall, and long lines of goats who leave
milk in a natural manner at various shops tangle themselves up with long
lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, with which the local
police struggle valiantly. All of these things, troops and goats and
yellow cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests with
curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats
and Tommies in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the main
street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a mask ball.
Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the key to the
Mediterranean, you can see but the little that lies open to you and to
every one along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works of the place
you are not allowed to have even a guess. The ramparts stretch all along
the western side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high shelving wall
which twists and changes its front at every hundred yards, and in such
an unfriendly way that whoever tried to scale its slippery surface at
one point would have a hundred yards of ramparts on either side of him,
from which two sides gunners and infantry could observe his efforts with
comfort and safety to themselves; and from which, when tired of watching
him slip and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would blow him into
bits. But they would probably save him the trouble of coming so far by
doing that before he left his vessel in the bay. The northern face of
the Rock--that end which faces Spain, and which makes the head of the
crouching lion--shows two long rows of teeth cut in its surface by
convicts of long ago. You are allowed to walk through these dungeons,
and to look down upon the Neutral Ground and the little Spanish town at
the end of its half-mile over the butts of great guns. And you will
marvel not so much at the engineering skill of whoever it was who
planned this defence as at the weariness and the toil of the criminals
who gave up the greater part of their lives to hewing and blasting out
these great galleries and gloomy passages, through which your footsteps
echo like the report of cannon.
[Illustration: AN ENGLISH SENTRY]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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