The train leaves you at the foot of the town before the quaint fortressed bridge of Alcántara. In these days of unpretentious exits and entrances, when we scarcely detect the outskirts of a city from the open way, or the suburbs from the heart of urban movement, these two castellated bridges, by which you enter and leave Toledo, have a strange and insistent air of feudality that at once captures fancy, and resembles the flourish of trumpets in martial dramas. Civilisation instantly waves backward, and leaves imagination thrilled upon the shores of legend. At a bound memory is at the core of troubled Spanish history, a sad and spectral ghost, in the thrall of wonderment and admiration. Surely never was town, with all our modern needs of bread-winning and competition, of commerce and politics, of cheap ambition and every-day social intercourse, so curiously, magnificently faithful to its past. So precisely must Toledo have looked, barring the electric light, when the last page of its intimate history was written. Just so brown and barren, with its front of unflinching austerity, its stern wealth of architecture, the air of romantic elegance and charmed slumber it breathes upon sadness, with its look of legendary musing and widowed remembrance. So, unchanged, must it have been in its great day of hieratic glory, of Gothic rule, of Saracen triumph and of feudal revolt. [Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA] From the bridges, the road winds up the steep rock, upon whose summit this unique old city is built. The views at every turn of the winding path are entrancing. There is every strange effect to gratify the eager eye in search of the picturesque: an unsurpassed boldness of site, from the wide zone of the Tagus to the point of the Cathedral tower pinnacled against the upper arch of heaven. Project high rocks upon which odd and delightful passages, neither street nor lane, full of colour and curve and varied line, are cut like sharp upward and downward strokes, over frowning ravines, and swelling by swift ascent from the yellow band of water below, that imprisons the town like a moat, and along with the martial bridges, give the impression of being cut off from the big lively world, a prisoner in a city of dreamland. At once you yield yourself to the gracious grip of your enchanter and gaoler. The eye rests in ineffable contentment upon the violent line of empty hills, yellow and brown and rose, turned violet by the sun's retreat, and you feel no longing for the vulgar and bustling present you have left behind. Here to sit awhile and dream, not days but unending months, in the shadow of a mighty cathedral, in what a Spanish writer with Iberian imagery, has called "a case of mediæval jewels." It is a fitting note of environment that the landscape should be stamped by an ardent and ineffaceable desolation, incessantly exposed to devastating winds, swept by fierce rains and blinding dust and remorseless sunfire. Nature is