Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  Some of the old church remained; part of the nave, the base of the tower, the sculptured figures over the west door. San Pedro must have been a magnificent church. I was shown over the ruins and over the new building by an intelligent priest; he gave me a booklet about its history, which related also much of the history of the town. Figueras was the Roman Juncaria, and stood on a Roman military road; it was destroyed by Saracens in the early Middle Ages, and rebuilt, further from the road, a plain and humble town which the inhabitants called Tapioles; in the course of time it became Ficerias, Figariæ, Figueras. To-day the ancient name is only preserved in one district, called Tapis. Tradition says that St. Paul (so busy in Spain) visited Juncaria, landing at Emporion, and preached the Christian religion there with immense success, which produced later several martyr saints. The Saracens destroyed Figueras and its first (probably Visigothic) church; after the reconquest it was rebuilt, with the help of the San Pere de Rosa Benedictines. This Romanesque church was burnt down, with the whole town, by an incendiary count of Ampurias. With its indefatigable powers of recuperation, Figueras built itself and its church up again, the latter in the purest Catalan Gothic of the fifteenth century; austere and tremendous, its severity lightened by its graceful campanario. There were later disasters and attacks, and the campanario was scarred by French bullets; but the church remained standing for nearly five hundred years, its longest period yet. Then, on July 21st, 1936, the Figuerenses began to set fire to churches; ‘surgió la chispa necrosificadora, el espiritu satanico de destructión y de ruina …’ the mob broke into the parish church during Mass, seized benches and chairs, and set them ablaze. What a conflagration! Flames leaped to the roof. ‘The faithful, livid with fear, retired into a corner of the church, believing their last hour to have come,’ but they were allowed to go without molestation. The flames consumed nearly everything; what they left was looted or destroyed.

  Mysterious madness which ever and anon attacks the Spanish, driving them to these strange pyrrhic frenzies! It seems the reverse side of religious devotion: in Anglican England we have little of either; in consequence our churches and cathedrals remain standing, though somewhat sparsely filled. It was odd to picture the cheerful Figuerenses at their fiery work, seeing them so peaceably and gaily employed in their broad market square on this July morning eleven years later. Indeed, this morning market was a lovely sight - a brilliant orchard of gay fruits piled on stalls-oranges, peaches, apricots, greengages, melons, tomatoes; and behind each stall a smiling buxom woman selling, before it other smiling buxom women buying; had they, I wondered, eleven years ago tossed pictures and images on the bonfire in San Pedro as now they tossed oranges and apricots into straw bags, and with the same zest? From all accounts, yes.

  Meanwhile, the new San Pedro goes up apace, and will be beautiful. If it lasts another five hundred years, it will be lucky. The ancient castle of San Fernando, north-east of the town, was blown up in 1939, a last explosion of the Republicans when Franco’s army marched in. Figueras is a pleasant capital; it has broad ramblas and narrow streets, and is difficult to find one’s way out of. It had no petrol. They told me at the garages that petrol north of Barcelona was chancey; one might find some pump which had just got its quota, or one might not. La Escala, they said, might have some. They spoke as embittered men: the Ampurdán, one gathered, was being starved of petrol to feed Barcelona, which drank it with gluttonous profusion.

  My mind was now set on Ampurias; I hurried out of Figueras, with my basket full of fruit and pots bought in the market. It was another hot and shining day. My way to La Escala and the coast ran through fifteen miles of level country, along a jolting road, past little ochre-coloured mediæval villages and farms, across the river Fluvia, and so through Vilademat to the little port of Escala, at the southern end of the Gulf of Rosas, whence a short road goes through woods to Ampurias. I arrived in La Escala in a propitious hour: petrol had just arrived, and there was a queue of camions at the pump in the street leading down to the shore, and a busy woman working it. (Most petrol pumps in northern Spain, as in France, are worked by women; further south, not; in the south women are not, I think, supposed to meddle with anything to do with motoring; they stick to donkeys.) The little port was crowded with beautiful fishing boats, great and small; I think it was a holiday, for it was gay with music and coloured paper festoons. Fantastically shaped rocks jutted up about the sea. Señor Pla says Escala is the chief fishing centre of the Costa Brava, and that the fishermen have a hard life, for the port faces north, and in winter gets the tramontana and the icy winds from Canigou and Provence. This, says he, has made the escalanes a rather sad, pessimistic people. Fortunately it was not winter when I was there; on that July morning La Escala was blue and exquisite, though its rock-strewn bay was ruffled by a breeze. The town did not look sad and grey, as my book said, though it does lack the brilliant whitewash and paint of many of the harbour towns. At nights the fishing boats go out with lights, the whole Gulf sparkles as with fireflies, and is very exquisite. Tiny coves of rock and sand surround the town to north and south; that morning they were pale jade and aquamarine, the waves lapping against jagged rocks.

  The short road to Ampurias crosses a bridge just outside La Escala and runs through a sandy pine-wood. The ruins lie above the road, back from a bay of delightful sand and jutting rocks, the bay where Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio landed with his squadron to fight the Carthaginians, ‘at a place in Iberia called Emporium,’ says Polybius. ‘Starting from this town, he made descents upon the coast, landing and besieging those who refused to submit to him along the seaboard as far as the Iber …’

  The Emporium where Scipio landed in 211 B.C. was already over three centuries old as a Greek settlement, and illimitably older as an Iberian village. Somewhere about 550 B.C. Phocæan sailors and traders from Marseilles, cut off from the southern coast by the iron curtain of the Carthaginian conquest, made here, in the shelter of this Gulf of Rosas, and close to a small native town, a trading settlement. They settled first on what was then an island, where the almost ruined little mediæval village of San Martí now stands, guarding that buried town of Paleopolis, and a temple of the Ephesian Artemis which must have stood there. This first settlement is still unexcavated. The second, Neapolis, made a few years later, on the other side of the little harbour and buried from sight for many centuries, only yielding up occasional treasures to casual searchers, was first systematically excavated by the Barcelona archæological society forty years ago; interrupted by the civil war, the work is now again in progress. Neapolis has been revealed, layer below layer, each period identifiable by its fragments of pottery and sculpture and its coins, from the Visigothic town superimposed on it by the barbarian invaders, through the Roman city of splendid and ornate buildings, market places, temples and rich villas, the Hellenistic city that preceded and merged with the Roman, the Attic town of the fifth century, down to the earliest levels, the level of the sixth-century Massiliotes who founded the settlement and of the Iberian town joined to it; of those earliest towns there is little to show now. Neapolis was, when Strabo described it in the first century A.D., a double city, divided by a wall

  because formerly the city had for neighbours some of the Indicetans, who, though they maintained a government of their own, wished for the sake of security to have a common wall of circumvallation with the Greeks, with the enclosure in two parts, for it has been divided by a wall through the centre; but in the course of time the two peoples united under the same constitution, which was a mixture of barbarian and Greek laws.

  Livy’s account is more detailed.

  Even at that time [195 B.C., when Cato landed there with army and fleet] Emporiæ consisted of two towns separated by a wall. One was inhabited by Greeks from Phocæa (whence came the Massilienses also) the other by the Spaniards: but the Greek town, being entirely open to the sea, had only a small extent of wall, while the Spaniards, who were further back from the sea, had a wall three miles round. A third class of inhab
itants, Roman colonists, was added by the deified Cæsar … and at present all are fused in one mass, the Spaniards first, and later the Greeks, having been received into Roman citizenship. One who saw them at that time would wonder what secured the safety of the Greeks, with the open sea on one side and the Spaniards, so fierce and warlike a people, their neighbours on the other. Discipline was their protector against their weakness. … The part of the wall which faced the interior they kept strongly fortified, with only a single gate, and at this one of the magistrates was posted as a continuous guard. At night a third of the citizens kept vigil on the walls. No Spaniard was admitted to the city, nor did the Greeks themselves leave the city without good cause. Towards the sea the gates were open to all. Through the gate which led to the Spanish town they never passed except in large bodies, usually the third which had kept the watch on the wall the night before. The cause of going out of the town was this: the Spaniards, who had no experience with the sea, enjoyed transacting business with them, and wanted both to buy the foreign merchandise which they brought in their ships, and to dispose of the products of their own farms. The desire of the benefits of this interchange caused the Spanish city to be open to the Greeks.

  The remains of the walls, huge and massive, with their single gate, are of the fifth century B.C. By then, Emporion had Greek works of art, Attic vases, the famous statue of Asklepios and other Athenian objects. Emporitans grew richer and more cultivated; by the fourth century, the Hellenistic age, their town was enlarged and beautified, a long, crowded rectangle of crossing streets and open squares, villas with mosaic floors, tombs, temples, statues. There was the temple of Jupiter Serapis, surrounded by a spacious colonnade, the door giving on the sea. There was a stoa, or market-place, with shops within and pillared ambulatory without, where buyers and sellers walked, chaffering and bartering in Greek, Iberian, Latin, all the dialects of the Middle Sea. And through the city the winds from this sea, and the sound of it, murmured always.

  The Romans came; Emporion wisely allied itself with Rome, as a defence against Carthage. Romans colonized the Hellenistic town, making a city behind it far larger, richer, finer, than Emporion itself. There were beautiful houses, grand temples, rich mosaic floors, cisterns, plumbing, baths. The name was now Emporiæ, for there were three cities, the Roman, the Greek, the Iberian. Recent excavations of the Roman town have discovered its great wall, built by Cæsar, on the base of an older wall of the cyclopean type. There have also been exposed a gymnasium, and a large elliptical amphitheatre. Emporion under the Romans had advanced far from the early cramped Greek town. In the third century Frankish pirates attacked the coast and destroyed Neapolis; its inhabitants abandoned it, and settled in the Roman city, which was presently Christianized; there was a basilica, and a Christian burial ground. Then, in Rome’s decadence, arrived the barbarians, and the Visigothic town super-imposed itself on Emporion. It became the seat of a bishopric.

  Then, by the ninth century, Ampurias disappears from history; it has been conjectured that it was sacked and destroyed by the Norman pirates who raged up and down the coast, though some historians blame the Saracens. Villanueva, in his Viaje Literario a las Iglesias de España, quotes a record from the archives of the monastery of Santa Maria de Roda - ‘The pagans came and sacked the whole town, and the pirates laid waste the territory; its inhabitants and peasants were in large numbers taken captive, and many others, abandoning their farms during that time because of the oppressions of the wicked pirates, emigrated elsewhere.’

  A common story all down that perilous coast. Ampurias was apparently abandoned; and, after some attempts by its counts to revive it, they retired inland to Castellón de Ampurias, and the sea town gradually sank deeper beneath the silting sands, and was forgotten, to wait a thousand years for its unburial. The guidebooks of a century ago, such as Ford’s, count Emporion a complete loss, but for the ‘miserable ruined fishing hamlet’ on the hill close by; all that the Baedeker of 1901 says is that the name of Castellón de Ampurias ‘recalls Emporion, an ancient Greek colony on the Gulf of Rosas.’ Later English guidebooks only give Ampurias a few lines.

  Ampurias to-day is a place inexpressibly moving in its beauty and desolation. Along the intricate criss-cross of the streets that run between the vanished houses, cypresses darkly and necro-polistically stand, and fig trees sprawl stickily in the sun. The columns of arcaded porticoes and of temples rear broken stumps against sky and sea. You may wander through the city among ghosts of Greek traders, Iberian vendors, Roman gentlemen lounging outside their villas or gossiping in loud Roman voices in the agora, simple Visigoths knocking down heathen statues and drinking deeply of the wines of Ampurdán.

  Across a sandy stretch of land to the north the tumbled, ruinous little pile of San Marti climbs its rocky hill; beneath it sleeps forgotten the old, the original Paleopolis. In front of Ampurias the sea whispers and creams; its tang breathes about the ghostly city like a song. Before Herodotus wrote, Greeks lived and traded here; before Rome was a republic, this little Greek mart was doing business on the shores of the gulf that sheltered merchant ships beneath this great spur of the eastern Pyrenees. Now, along the massive wall above the sea road, red oleanders sprawl. A model of the Asklepios statue presides serenely over that broken desert of little streets. In the western corner, close to the Roman city, on the site of a ruined convent, stands the little museum, where some of the Ampurias finds can be seen - mosaics and vases, pottery of all the periods, fragments, some most lovely. Most of the important things are in the Barcelona archæological museum, and some at Gerona; but this little branch of it has kept some valuable finds, and also some interesting and pleasing model reconstructions of buildings. It is an unpretentious, rather charming little place.

  From Ampurias one goes a few hundred yards along the sea road to San Martí, the walled hamlet on the hill that was once an island. It is the quietest mediæval hamlet imaginable; but for one gay-tiled villa, the houses, inhabited by a few peasants and animals, seem all tumbling or tumbled into ruin. Its square-towered church crowns the steep streets. Why the village is in such dilapidation, and how long it has been so, I was not able to discover. I wandered about its empty, stony streets, and spoke with a few people outside a tumbling house; a peasant was driving a donkey cart piled with grass up the street; by the gate there was an ancient well. The counts of Ampurias used long ago to frequent this fortified town on its hill; but they retired inland to the safer fortress of Castellón, and San Marti was abandoned to peasants and pirates.

  I ate my lunch in the pine woods below the high, steep walls, then went back to Ampurias to spend the afternoon among its whispering centuries of ghosts. Leaving it at last, I drove back along the wood road to La Escala. From there a new road, made during the civil war, runs south for a few kilometres down the rocky coast of coves and capes as far as El Milá. But to explore these coves properly one needs a boat. The gnarled grey rocks jut out into a cobalt and azure sea with, in profile, the mute ferocity of couching beasts, sheltering between them here and there white coves of sand, above some of which a few cottages sprawl, and in and out of which fishing boats slip. A stormy sea among these fantastic wild-cat rocks must be an affair of sound, foam and fury; that July afternoon the Mediterranean was a suave and cooing murmuration of blue doves. But my road turned from it inland towards Gerona.

  It was a bad road. As a road there was nothing to be said for it, except that it ran through good scenery and passed fine mediæval towns. It was rough and jolting, like so many of the roads that lead to important cities in Spain, roads that shook my car continually to pieces. The pot-holes on the Gerona road were perhaps caused by Roman chariots thundering along them from the coast; or perhaps the Romans had found them thus and made them worse. No doubt they cursed. Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I. It was also, no doubt, the rough and turbulent counts of Ampurias, who, throughout the Middle Ages, thundered about Ampurdán, making such disturbances as they threw up castles and palaces and forts, and att
acked anything they met which did not submit to them. The Bishops of Gerona (often the cousins or uncles of the count) may also have done their share.

  Anyhow, and whosever fault it was, the road from La Escala to Gerona, via Belcaire and up the Ter valley, is execrable. My front bumper was jerked off, beginning a long series of such decadences. Throughout the nearly four thousand miles of road that I covered in the peninsula, I learnt that cars are not so firmly held together as one had hoped. One piece after another is liable to drop from them; there is a sudden intimidating clatter, and it will be either a bumper or an exhaust pipe or (more perilously, for I was once all but over the edge of a very steep mountain precipice) the steering axle, that, still attached at one end, has broken its bolts at the other and is clattering with a noise of machine guns along the road. If these objects, which I detested, but which were, it seemed, essential to my car’s structure, action, and well being, could be fastened on again with straps, I fastened them on with straps, until I reached the next garage. If they could not (like the steering axle) be fastened on with straps, or otherwise replaced by amateur effort, I left the car on the road and walked or got a lift to the next garage, to bring back mechanics with the necessary tools. It was not always quite easy to explain to the mechanics what the necessary tools would be. I had a Spanish motoring phrase book with me, but it said few of the things that I wished to say. It said, ‘Have you a really trustworthy man on whom I can rely to clean my car?’ and, ‘My car has fallen into a ditch. Do me the favour to send an ox (two oxen) to extricate it,’ and (more vaguely and pessimistically), ‘My car has discomposed itself. I have left it in charge of a peasant, - kilometres from here.’ (Fortunately I never required this peasant, since my car locks.) Once arrived at a garage, even without one’s car, one can explain what has gone wrong by indicating similar appliances on other cars and remarking ‘Esto no marcha,’ ‘This part does not go,’ or ‘This thing has fallen off.’ Spaniards are very helpful, kind and intelligent about cars. If they see a woman changing a wheel on the road, they leap from their camions or their cars and offer help; it is, I suppose, one side of their intense and apparently universal astonishment that a woman should be driving a car at all. All over Spain, except in the more sophisticated cities, my driving by was greeted with the same cry - a long, shrill cat-call, reminiscent of a pig having its throat cut, usually wordless, but sometimes accompanied by ‘Olé, Olé! Una señora que conduce!’ For Spanish women do not drive cars. I was told this many times, and indeed, observation confirmed it; I saw not a single woman driving all the time I was in Spain. Why not, I sometimes asked. ‘It is not the custom here. Spanish ladies live very quietly.’ One man, more analytic, explained, ‘You see, we Spanish do not live in this century at all, nor in the last, but several hundred years back. We hear that in England women do the things men do, but in Spain it has never been the custom.’ This is not true: the peasant women work in the fields and drive donkey carts everywhere; what he meant was señoras. And, apparently, so few foreign señoras are seen driving that they are still regarded as prodigiés and portents, much like a man suckling a baby. This, together with the intense Spanish interest in people, and particularly in women, makes it impossible for a woman-driven car to be allowed to pass without comment, as a harmless foreign oddity, as we more sophisticated, live-and-let-live English let foreigners and their strange habits go by without turning the head. In Spain, all heads are turned; and there is a disconcerting outcry. If any student of national psychology can analyse and explain this ancient Spanish custom (one gathers from all travellers that it is ancient) it would be an interesting investigation. The demonstrations sound mainly astonished and derisive; sometimes rather inimical; always excited and inquisitive. Strange ambivalence of the Spanish! If their curiosity is sometimes partly hostile, their helpfulness to foreigners in difficulty, and their flattering compliments to females (even elderly females such as myself) are delightful and admirable; we can never rival or repay them.