Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

Cartagena Eroica Mprne ville jadis reine des Oceans; Aujourd'hui le requin poursuit en paire les scombri's Et le nuage errant allonge seul les ombres. Sur ta rade on roulaient les gallons geants. — Jose Maria De Heredia By William McFee OL'T of the darkness of a great gulf you come tow anl that glamorous haze, a gulf within whose un furrowed recesses lie the bones of the legendary Englishman waiting for the rumble of his drum : Slung between the round-shot in Nombre Dios Bay, Dreaming all the while of Plymouth Hoe. and as the great swell from the Leeward Islands diminishes and dies away, and the ship rides steadily toward a long, shining and perplexing barrier, you behold a faint amber radiance, a blur of towers and a touch of gold, against the luminous azure of the horizon. And that is Cartagena, the heroic city of New Granada, compact of splendor and decrepitude, listening behind her enormous walls to the soothing murmur of the sea. For a space, however, as you approach the long and winding lagoon by the Boca Chica, there rises sharp and problematical the great ramp of La Popa, a hill running up into a headland and crowned by the ruined convent of Saint Candelaria. A notable landmark in a flat plain, like the hull of a vast stranded galleon cast away on the landward side and overshadowing the lower rocky fortresses of the citadel. And then, as you enter and the low grey forts of the lagoon come into view, the eye withdraws from the distances and becomes preoccupied with the city, which rises in a cluster of domes and towers, with here and there a stark factory in the outskirts, and white villas among palms. Domes and towers, faint, yet in the morning light, and touched with the reluctant glamorous haze even now, spread out as tho floating in the lagoon and distinct from the solidity beyond it, a romantic efflorescence of the sea. So it seems as you come in. The magic of this old town is multiplied as you draw near. She, surrounded so nearly by the purifying ocean, holds the secret of her charm against your foreign curiosity. You dare not scorn her, for she had made no demand upon your imagination in earlier days. You come ; she is there. You go; she remains, lovely behind her trernendous ramparts, a relic of a stately and vanished culture. These are just thoughts for the voyager as he approaches the shabby timber jetty which is her point of contact with an alien world, a jetty far out on a curving spit of land which divides the harbor from the lagoon. For it is a habit of these ancient cities to withdraw, as it were, shyly from a world of screaming deck winches and grunting locomotives and noisy stevedores. You find it so at Tunis, which is old Carthage, and Sfax, which is old Hadrumetum. You find it in old Suez since the Canal runs another road. You find it particularly here in Cartagena des Indias, who behind her walls of surf and masonry is impregnable against the arts of modern trade. No trolleycars can ever grind and jangle down those narrow streets with their innumerable balconies. No huge department store could lure her affrighted inhabitants within its crystal portals. Such gaunt phenomena of progress must stay outside, where are already relegated the railroad station and the cinema shows, beyond the great gate with the yellow clock-tower. So that within the city there reigns even at the busiest hours of the day a repose beyond measure ecclesiastical. There are streets which are but ambulatories of cathedrals, and squares dedicated beneath their somber vaulted cloisters to the meditations of piety. So there is no sense of secular unworthiness, as you enter the harsh interior of some enormous sanctuary from these quiet thorofares — an interior of plaster in daunting primary coloring, blood-red, blue and saffron, flanked by chapels of astonishing newness, and glittering with hardware. Here at first you discover no haven of rest; yet you tarry, noting the two little negresses whispering their confessions to a perforated .disk in the side of yonder mahogany cabinet, and wondering dizzily the nature of their nine-year-old wickedness, when you observe an opening into a patio on one side and make for it, cheered by the living green of the palms and ferns that grow there as in a well with yellow ochre walls. So you stand there by the stout railings, watching the old person who works amid the great fronds until you look up and see what might be called a miracle, in a less ironic age. For those walls of yellow ochre, flooded with light from the sun behind the cupolas, have a magical effect upon a sky that is always blue, but takes on now a depth and vitality of azure that eludes all categories or pigments. It is a blue that is alive and vibrating with thought. It is the blue of the Virgin's cloak in the stories, the blue of moonlight seen from beneath a summer sea, the color of eternity. Here, with your eyes lifted to the brim of this amber well, above the spouting verdure of the tropics, you can worship and become conscious of a soul moving stiffly within the coil of the senses. Yet moving. The little colored girls whispering to the perforated disk are less incomprehensible, the ironmongery of the altar merges 'into the common symbolism of life, and you turn to watch the tall bony figure of a priest in his blaGk robe and great hat patting the frizzed heads of his small charges ere they burst out into the sunshine of the street. And you are aware, as you follow across the sepulchred floor, that you have gotten something of that essence of humanity you left home to find. And outside in those same streets, as they burrow under the balconies in undeviating straight lines to the sea. the imagination can feed its (Cont'd on page 70) Page Fifteen