Chapter 70In Kabylia. Crossing to Palma — Barcelona — MontserratIN KABYLIEN. ÜBERFAHRT NACH PALMA — BARCELONA — MONT SERRAT
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
At the end, as the crown of the whole, I went by the mail coach over Fort Etienne to Michelet, the pearl of Grande Kabylie. It was still very raw and cold up in the mountains. Apart from the great military road, built long ago by the prisoners taken in the subjection of the Kabyles, there are nowhere any but breakneck goat tracks. One of these I climbed down to reach a few isolated Kabyle huts. These, along with their inhabitants, are thank God still wholly wild and uncivilised. They offered me wonderful Berber jewellery for sale. But they asked far too much for it, and I had to leave it. Michelet, though, lies in a magnificent nature and made a tremendous, quite unique impression on me.
Now I had grazed off Algeria with its finest flowers, though far from exhausting it, for its manifold charms are inexhaustible. I had to think about the journey home, but chose a ship that went by way of the Balearics, Palma, to Barcelona.
Palma offered me new and great surprises with its gigantic gothic cathedrals, the “Lonja,” the old exchange, the wonderful mediaeval palaces, and above all with the old castle in its fairy-tale situation. By carriage I made one more excursion inland to an old castle in a beautiful orange garden, Leixho1, which is filled over and over with antiquities.
And I looked at the curious Moorish windmills. On the third day it went on to Barcelona, which I knew already of course, and yet was glad to see again with its magnificent old churches and the new one still under construction, the church of the Sagrada famiglia. A madder and yet a more interesting huge building has never come my way. And I looked over the creation of the — I believe the same — architect Roëll2, an architectural complex on a giant scale made up of fantasy buildings. Without any settled style, and yet full of a monstrous fantasy. I noticed, brought in by him at any rate as a new idea, the Siamese technique of setting coloured bits of porcelain into the walls quite at random. And then at last I set off for Montserrat, the original of Montsalvat, where legend puts the castle of the Grail. It is a small journey from Barcelona, at the end by rack railway up the dolomite-like cone of rock. The monastery lies at the top, and its chapels and caves and places of pilgrimage and crucifixes are spread over an all but immeasurable terrain of the wildest crag landscape. The church is very pompous. One may stay for nothing in the guest quarters. Unfortunately neither my time nor my health allowed it. A violent storm was blowing, and my cold had for days — little regarded at first — been growing ever more violent.
So I meant to travel back the same day, to set off in the night by train for Marseilles. It was a great pity! All the same I enjoyed the unheard-of fantasy of this nature to the full, in walks of hours to the most various viewpoints. The monastery garden is uniquely full of mood. Everywhere the wild, dolomite-like crags stare down. They all have names, and each is wilder than the last. Montsalvat!
The journey to Marseilles was a martyrdom with my sore throat and the tormenting cough — in a crammed third-class compartment.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Leixho — Almost certainly Raixa, the estate of the Despuig family in the hills behind Palma — an orange garden and a house of Roman antiquities, which is her sentence exactly. Raixa was rebuilt as an Italian villa by Cardinal Antoni Despuig (1745–1813), who financed excavations on Majorca and shipped Roman marbles home from Italy, so that the house filled with sculpture. Nothing else within a carriage drive of Palma answers to an old castle in a beautiful orange garden filled over and over with antiquities. The name as she gives it, Leixho, is not a Majorcan place name in any spelling this project can find, and Raixa is pronounced with the sh she is trying to write. The estate had been sold out of the family in 1906 and the Despuig marbles were dispersed afterwards; a good part of them is in the Castell de Bellver today, which she had seen the same week without knowing the connection. (Raixa)
- ↑the — I believe the same — architect Roëll — Park Güell, and she is right that it is the same architect. The name she gives is the patron's, not the builder's — Güell, not Gaudí — and she has heard it as Roëll. Eusebi Güell commissioned the park from Antoni Gaudí in 1900 as a garden estate above Barcelona; the houses never sold, work stopped in 1914, and it became a public park in 1926. So she is walking through it in the year it was abandoned, and her doubtful I believe the same is correct. What she then does is the remarkable part. The broken-tile mosaic Catalans call trencadís was new to Europe and she does not reach for a European comparison at all: she calls it the Siamese technique of setting coloured bits of porcelain into the walls quite at random. She had been in Bangkok in 1909, on the second world journey, where the temples are faced with broken Chinese porcelain pressed into stucco — Wat Arun above all. It is a comparison almost nobody in 1914 was in a position to make, and it is closer to the truth of the surface than the art criticism of the day managed. (Park Güell)