Part 12
The “mountain of the moon,” and of its goddess Cynthia, devoted from the dawn of time to the worship of deities that, one by one, have been deposed, this long-backed hummock, stretching nearly fifteen miles from end to end and rising well-nigh two thousand feet above the plain, is one of Europe’s acknowledged beauty spots, and, like a human professional beauty, on this occasion coyly hid its charms from too ready a discovery by cloaking its summit with a cloud as black as ink, forerunner of the coming night. The gradient of the line continues upward as we wind round the base of the hill, and it is quite dark when the terminal station of Cintra is reached, and after a long drive upward the quaint little English hostelry, known to four generations of Britons, welcomes me to dinner and to rest.
Like the similar mountain of Bussaco, the “Rock of Lisbon” is scored by ravines and dells innumerable, sheltered valleys open to the soft sea-breezes charged with grateful moisture; and from time immemorial the luxuriance and variety of its vegetation have been proverbial. At a time when Lisbon, only some fifteen miles away, is sweltering and breathless within its south facing semicircle of hills, the slopes of the mountain of Cintra are fresh and invigorating, and some of its gardens are a veritable paradise all the year round. But beautiful as it undoubtedly is, Cintra owes much of its fame to its nearness and accessibility to the capital, and so far as English celebrity is concerned, to the accident of several influential Englishmen persistently singing its praises at a time when Lisbon was a fashionable winter and health resort.
The village of Cintra lies in one of the folds of the great hill, at perhaps a third of its height up the side: a little Swiss-looking pleasure-town round an open praça, like a set scene upon a stage. A few hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee with the passers-by: at one end of the praça, a lovely ancient Manueline cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the roof, looking like a cross between Kentish oast-houses, and giant champagne bottles. This is Cintra as seen from its central point, but over it all there towers that which gives unique distinction to its otherwise somewhat trite, self-conscious picturesqueness. Sheer aloft upon a precipice a thousand feet and more above its roofs there stretch the mighty battlements and massive keeps of a huge castle of fawn-coloured stone, a castle so immense as to dwarf Thomar, Leiria, and even Obidos almost to insignificance. Long lines of crenellated walls following the dips and sinuosities of the crest of the peak appear to grow out of the mighty rounded boulders; some of these great masses of rock seeming to hang over perilously—as they must have done for thousands of years—top-heavy and threatening.
[Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA.]
To climb such an eminence looks impracticable when seen from the praça of the little town, and yet it is but a pleasant and easy walk up the zigzag road round the projecting shoulder of the hill. As I start in the early morning to ascend the two twin peaks, only one of which is visible from the praça, the air is indescribably sweet with the mingled freshness of the sea and the perfume of herbs and flowers. The way winds upwards between the trim walls of villas embosomed in gardens. Ampelopsis, blood-red now, long trails of wistaria and starry clematis, and large fuchsia trees loaded with flower, hang over the pathway everywhere, whilst masses of heliotrope clothe the jutting gables and corners, and pervading all are the scent and sight of oceans of flowers. Palms, planes, poplars, and firs shoot upward, and around their straight bare trunks there clusters a tangle of figs, laurels, mimosa, camellias, aloes, and cactus. On the outer side of the road, as the villas are left behind, you may look over the dwarf-wall down the tree-clad slopes into glens of deep shade, with here and there a glimpse through the branches of a vast sunlight plain far below, whilst on the inner side of the zigzag way, the mosses and ferns, and the pendent greenery of the precipitous hillside, with an occasional break into a deep ravine, exhibit at each turn and step some new beauty of tint or atmosphere. Presently at a turn of the road, after half-an-hour’s climb, you see right over head the bare granite cliff covered with huge overhanging boulders, and on the summit a long stretch of yellow battlements and a huddle of enormous towers. The trees around us are mostly oaks now, and the grey boulders are covered on their inner faces with ivy and lichens, whilst clumps of purple crocuses star the grass by the wayside. The sun is as hot as July in England, but the breeze is delightfully fresh and pure, the sky of spotless azure, and the air so clear that the ancient fortress, still far above us, is seen in all its detail as if we had it near to us under a giant microscope.
Suddenly as I turned a corner there burst upon my view another and a loftier peak than the one upon which stands the Moorish stronghold that had hitherto been my objective. A crag so inaccessible it looked, as to suggest that the imposing building upon it with its lofty towers was the work of a magician. The royal palace of the Penha is this, piled up rather than built upon a sheer precipice.[2] Here upon the highest point of the rock of Lisbon was King Manuel the Fortunate wont to linger for hours and days for many months together, climbing up from his palace in the town below, that he might gaze far out upon the Atlantic, watching and praying for the return of Vasco da Gama from his voyage to India round the African continent, the route that in two generations the impetus of Prince Henry the Navigator had opened up. There was but a tiny Jeronomite hermitage or penitentiary here in this savage eyrie to shelter the anxious king,[3] and during his vigils he vowed that if the great explorer came home successful he would build upon the spot a worthy monastery of the Order in memory of the event. The work must have been a prodigious one, for even now the place is hardly accessible by carriages, and the quantity and the weight of material necessarily brought from below was enormous. This monastery like the rest, was disestablished and secularised by the State in 1834, and King Ferdinand, the consort of the Queen of Portugal, and a first cousin of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, bought the building for conversion into a royal palace, as it remains to-day, and here he lived the latter years of his life with his second wife, the ex-opera-dancer, the Countess of Edla. Ferdinand altered his palace, in many cases with very doubtful taste, Moorish and German baronial features being liberally grafted on to the Manueline edifice, with the result that the whole building when seen closely is a pretentious muddle, saved from contempt by some of its ancient portions, and by its sublime situation.
The palace on the peak was soon lost to sight again on my climb upward, and the path led direct to the outer donjon of the Moorish stronghold opening upon a narrow path cut along the face of the rock, and bordered on the outer side by a low stone wall. The view down over the steep, rocky slope, with the town of Cintra far below, and the plain limitless beyond, is very fine, and the walls that border the path are clothed with mosses and ferns almost as lovely as those of Bussaco. The fortress must have been impregnable by force; and indeed was only gained at last from the Moors by treason, this very gate having been bought by the Christians from an unfaithful guardian. This narrow path cut on the face of the precipice is the only practicable approach to the fortress, and leads soon to yet another gate flanked by a strong tower built upon one vast, solid boulder. The dells below are filled with billows of verdure; the face of the rock on the inner side of the path is covered with creepers, ferns, and flowers, whilst above them, high up in the dips near the summit, great trees lean over, shading the way by which we come. Yet another strong gate tower we pass through; and with a sudden turn we are inside the fortress, on the right of us a ruined chapel, once a mosque, and on the left a watch-tower, with, at its foot, a monument upon which the cross is graven surmounting the crescent, emblematical of the fate of the adjoining chapel.
To describe in detail this prodigious ruin would be impossible in any reasonable space. The summit of the crag consists of two separate peaks at some distance from each other, the higher one occupied by the main keep, “the royal tower,” and long battlemented walls reach from one point to the other, with bastions at intervals and massive square keeps at the salient angles. On all sides within the great enclosure formed by the battlements, covering the whole summit, remains of towers and buildings of various sorts are scattered, amidst the dense growth of trees and brushwood that have intruded upon the space. The battlements, many of them built upon the rounded boulders that border the precipice and following the contour of the hill top, are strong and perfect still; and it needs but little imagination to people them again with the turbaned and mailed warriors, sheltered snugly behind them, watching for the advancing hosts of the Christian king, certain that, so long as Islam was true to itself, no force could take this stronghold of their race. The view over the battlements on all sides is tremendous. Just below the walls a Titanic scatter of boulders, varying in size from a few feet in diameter to the bulk of a cathedral, and then the descending folds of greenery, with the sunlit plains and clustering towns below; and there on the west, seemingly almost at the foot, a long stretch of breaker-strewn beach, and the blue line of the sea. The view on the Cintra side is almost appalling, the drop from the battlements and boulders to the town being almost sheer, and on the south-east a great bay opens, and the mouth of the Tagus bounds the prospect.
As I gazed, entranced at this wonderful scene, surrounded by yet sturdy relics of the war of civilisations eight centuries old; musing upon the immutability of nature’s face in comparison with even the most enduring works of man, I noticed a wire fixed on the face of the Moorish battlement, and thence to a boulder, and so from point to point, I know not whither—to the palace or the adjoining peak, perhaps. A telegraph wire! A familiar object enough, but, as it seemed to me, strangely out of harmony with the stern battlements from which for centuries the sons of the prophet held back the advance of Western civilisation.
The point upon which the Moorish stronghold stands is connected with the higher site of the palace by a saddle-back dipping considerably and then rising very precipitously. The vegetation on all sides is marvellously luxuriant, and inside the well-kept gardens of the royal domain flowers and plants, temperate and sub-tropical, make the place a horticultural paradise. Through graceful Moorish archways, bright with Alambresque decorations and _azulejos_, under rocky tunnels and over mediæval drawbridges, all redolent of the gimcrack taste of the forties, the upward way leads at length to the little inner _patio_ of the castle, and here, at last, some of the Manueline monastery still remains. It is little enough, a window here and a door there, and is almost swamped by modern Alambresque and German baronial additions, but the ancient chapel in the _patio_ is a gem. The beautiful groined ceiling especially attracts attention, but the pride of the place is the exquisite altar of translucent alabaster or jasper and black marble in the purest style of the classical Renaissance, dated 1532, a thank-offering of King John III. for the birth of an heir. The many groups of figures in alabaster are extremely beautiful, and as the whole structure turns upon a pivot the perfection of the work can be seen in various lights. A concession to the Portuguese Manueline taste of the time is made by the pendent festoons on each side of the altar, which are formed of two lengths of knotted and twisted cable in alabaster, a _tour de force_ of execution, though rigid purists may perhaps question their artistic appropriateness.
The chapel is marred by the hard, bright German stained glass inserted in the principal window by King Ferdinand; but the modern Portuguese is very far from being critical in matters of art, and though hundreds of people yearly toil up the mountain to venerate the holy image of the Virgin of the Penha in this chapel, and the lovely ivory figure of St. John in the sacristy, no one apparently thinks of removing the flashing offence of the stained glass window in favour of some subdued medium more appropriate to this beautiful little church. A climb to the highest tower of the palace is said to be rewarded by a magnificent view. I was content to take it on trust, for I had already climbed high enough, and could hardly hope to behold a more striking prospect than those I had enjoyed from the castle battlements, and from the inner _patio_ of the palace itself, which is perhaps the most striking of them all.
As I retrace my steps down the long zigzags to Cintra again, and ever and anon look up at the heights from which I have come, they seem quite inaccessible. Equally, or more so, does the somewhat lower, but even more precipitous eminence called the Cruz Alta, from which the prospect is of surpassing extent over land and sea.
“Eis campinas que ao ceo seu canto elevam, Aqui o espaço, alem a immensidade,”
“Behold the plains their psalms raise to the sea, Here spread below in space, beyond immensity,”
as the Portuguese poem on the base of the cross proclaims.
Everywhere the flowers trail over the walls of villas, and the high palms within rock softly in the heliotrope scented breeze. Very beautiful it is; but the gardens belong to other people, and are jealously closed by stone walls and iron gates. From above them, at hundreds of points all over Cintra, you may command views of gardens of tropical luxuriance; but without permission of the wealthy owners you may not enter them. Cintra’s beauty is not free like the sacred wood of Bussaco, where you may wander at your will through purely sylvan scenery that not even Cintra can surpass. The grandeur of the towering Moorish stronghold on its crest of grey boulders is more imposing than anything Bussaco can show, and the interior of some of the highly cultivated private gardens of Cintra are as fine as any in Europe; but, so far as the enjoyment of the mere traveller is concerned, I am inclined to agree with the opinion of those who hold that Cintra’s fame is quite equal to its merits. Beckford had very much to do with it. His friends the Marialvas were amongst the first of the Portuguese aristocracy, and owed the large palace of Seteaes, where Byron and some guide-books erroneously say that the humiliating convention of Cintra was signed by the victorious English generals. Beckford’s visits to them and to the court at Cintra inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration for the place, and his letters are full of references to its beauty. To the immensely wealthy and eccentric young Englishman desires and their accomplishment ever went hand in hand, and Beckford purchased a picturesque valley and slopes of the mountain some two miles from the town round the shoulder of the hill towards the west. Here he built an eccentric house, partly in the Moorish style, and here he displayed the virtuoso tastes and exotic luxury which afterwards made Fonthill famous.[4]
All that money and skill could do was lavished upon the gardens in the ravines and slopes of Monserrate; and long before Beckford died the place became famous throughout Europe. Sir Francis Cook, Viscount de Monserrate, to whom Monserrate belonged for many years, greatly extended and improved the property, and his son, Sir Frederick Cook, the present owner, has followed the same course of munificent maintenance of this earthly paradise; with the result that now the beauties of the glens at Monserrate are probably unequalled in their own way. It was the middle of October when I visited the gardens on this occasion, although I had seen it in all the glory of its spring and summer splendour on other visits, and the luxuriance of the vegetation showed as yet no signs of waning. Great magnolias, daturas, and bougainvilliers were in full flower, with roses, clematis, brilliant coleas, and immense quantities of heliotrope. Tree ferns, aloes, agaves, and palms grew with a freedom in the open air that not even the hot-houses of Kew could surpass, whilst the crimson ampelopsis and golden-leaved maples presented gorgeous masses of colour. Some of the sylvan views are perfectly charming; but after all, one feels that one is simply an interloper seeing the showplace on sufferance by payment of a shilling—which the owner gives to a charity—and a sylvan scene, perhaps less lovely, but in which I could roam at will, as at Bussaco, would have had greater attraction for me.
Upon a peak opposite Monserrate, and belonging to the same owner, stands a humble little monastery that once belonged to the Franciscan-Capuchins. It is a quaint and curious place, the cloister, a tiny one, being joined to a rock, out of which the cells are excavated. These and the doors and ceilings of the cloister are lined with cork bark for warmth and cosiness in this exposed position, and for centuries the hermit-monks lived and prayed on this peak overlooking almost as great a panorama as the Jeronomites on the high crest of the Penha. Franciscans and Jeronomites are alike gone now; but in this case at least the place has been saved from desecration, and the little chapel is maintained with reverent care by Sir Frederick Cook, to whom the place belongs. Byron and Southey, too, did much for the fame of Cintra. In a room at Lawrence’s Hotel, commanding a fine view of plain and sea, the former wrote a portion of “Childe Harold,” and his references in verse to the beauty of the place are numerous. Writing of the cork convent, Byron refers thus to Honorius, a rigid ascetic who in a cave there lived long years in self-imposed penance:—
“Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell, In hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell.”
Volumes of poetry, indeed, have been in the aggregate written about Cintra. Byron made it practically his first stage of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and went in raptures over it:—
“Lo, Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes In variegated maze of mount and glen. Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide or pen To follow half on which the eye dilates, Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken Than those whereof such things the bard relates Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates— The horrid crags by toppling convent crown’d, The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, The mountain moss by scorching skies embrown’d, The sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep, The tender azure of the unruffled deep, The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, The vine on high, the willow branch below, Mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow.”
The poet, in one of his letters to his mother complaining of the dirt and discomfort of Lisbon, says: “To make amends for the filthiness of Lisbon and its still filthier inhabitants, the village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from the capital, is perhaps in every respect the most delightful in Europe. It contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial; palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights; a distant view of the sea and the Tagus.... It unites in itself all the wildness of the Western Highlands with the verdure of the south of France.”
Robert Southey, too, calls Cintra “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe,” and Beckford’s letters are crowded with eloquent passages to the same effect. “The scenery,” he says, “is truly Elysian, and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.... The mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards and rustic bridges you meet with at every step, recall Savoy and Switzerland to the imagination; but the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of the citron, the golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle, and the rich fragrance of the turf, embroidered with the brightest coloured and most aromatic flowers, allow me, without a violent stretch of fancy, to believe myself in the garden of the Hesperides.”
The Portuguese poets have of course dwelt much upon the beauties of Cintra, especially Almeida Garrett, the principal Portuguese poet of modern times. One stanza by him is cut upon a slab erected on one of his favourite walks in the village as a memorial, and the following lines from it may be quoted:—
“Cintra, amena estancia, Throno da vegetante primavera: Quem te não ama, quem em teu regaço Uma hora da vida lhe ha corrido, Essa hora esquecerá?”
“Ah! Cintra, blest abode, The throne of budding spring, Who loves thee not: and who Can e’er forget in life An hour passed in thy lap?”
When the stronghold on the crest of the mountain was securely held by the Moslem soldiery, before the great Affonso Henriques swept southward with the Cross victorious, the Moorish kings of Lisbon lived in silken ease below in their summer alcazar in the praça of Cintra—a building this full of interest still, though injudicious or inexperienced travellers have caused no little disappointment by comparing it unjustifiably with the splendid Arab remains at Seville, Granada, and Toledo. Truth to say, the palace at Cintra is no Alhambra, and should not be approached with expectations of anything of the sort. And yet the place is very quaint and charming as you enter the courtyard from the praça, hard by the Manueline cross with its spiral shaft. The front of the palace appears to be purely Manueline, the elaborate window and door decoration, consisting of twisted cables and intertwined branches, and even the pillars, spouts, and gargoyles are all redolent of Portugal’s age of heroic expansion and wealth under the “Fortunate” king.