Chapter XXXII.

Gibraltar.

  Unwritten Links of Travel—­Departure from Southampton—­The Bay of
  Biscay—­Cintra—­Trafalgar—­Gibraltar at Midnight—­Landing—­Search for a
  Palm-Tree—­A Brilliant Morning—­The Convexity of the
  Earth—­Sun-Worship—­The Rock.

------“to the north-west, Cape St. Vincent died away,
Sunset ran, a burning blood-red, blushing into Cadiz Bay. 
In the dimmest north-east distance dawned Gibraltar, grand and gray.”

  Browning.

Gibraltar, Saturday, November 6, 1852.

I leave unrecorded the links of travel which connected Messina and Gibraltar.  They were over the well-trodden fields of Europe, where little ground is left that is not familiar.  In leaving Sicily I lost the Saracenic trail, which I had been following through the East, and first find it again here, on the rock of Calpe, whose name, Djebel el-Tarik (the Mountain of Tarik), still speaks of the fiery race whose rule extended from the unknown ocean of the West to “Ganges and Hydaspes, Indian streams.”  In Malta and Sicily, I saw their decaying watch-towers, and recognized their sign-manual in the deep, guttural, masculine words and expressions which they have left behind them.  I now design following their footsteps through the beautiful Belad-el-Andaluz, which, to the eye of the Melek Abd-er-rahman, was only less lovely than the plains of Damascus.

While in Constantinople, I received letters which opened to me wider and richer fields of travel than I had already traversed.  I saw a possibility of exploring the far Indian realms, the shores of farthest Cathay and the famed Zipango of Marco Polo.  Before entering on this new sphere of experiences, however, it was necessary for me to visit Italy, Germany, and England.  I sailed from Messina to Leghorn, and travelled thence, by way of Florence, Venice, and the Tyrol, to Munich.  After three happy weeks at Gotha, and among the valleys of she Thueringian Forest, I went to London, where business and the preparation for my new journeys detained me two or three weeks longer.  Although the comforts of European civilization were pleasant, as a change, after the wild life of the Orient, the autumnal rains of England soon made me homesick for the sunshine I had left.  The weather was cold, dark, and dreary, and the oppressive, sticky atmosphere of the bituminous metropolis weighed upon me like a nightmare.  Heartily tired of looking at a sun that could show nothing brighter than a red copper disk, and of breathing an air that peppered my face with particles of soot, I left on the 28th of October.  It was one of the dismalest days of autumn; the meadows of Berkshire were flooded with broad, muddy streams, and the woods on the hills of Hampshire looked brown and sodden, as if slowly rotting away.  I reached Southampton at dusk, but there the sky was neither warmer nor clearer, so I spent the evening over a coal fire, all impatience for the bright beloved South, towards which my face was turned once more.