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He won a pitched battle on this occasion, and was very successful in his whole campaign. Polybius indeed tells us that in one day at his command all the cities on this side of the river Guadalquiver pulled down their walls; and yet they were very numerous, and filled with a warlike population.
But the black bull came farther out from his covert, tearing the bank with his hoofs, erecting his tail like a banner, ripping up the earth with his sharp horns, and bellowing a defiance after us, that made me tremble where I stood. Heaven help the matador, whom fate should throw into the path of that terrible creature. "The banks of the Guadalquiver are Arcadian, after the prairies are passed.
Many travellers have told of the glories of Seville, to which ancient Moorish city I journeyed with all speed, sailing there up the Guadalquiver, and I have to tell of lands from which no other wanderer has returned to England, and must press on to them.
Here, on a sloping spur of the Sierra Morena, in the upper valley of the Guadalquiver, about seventy miles east of Cordova, lies an extended table-land, a grand plateau whose somewhat sloping surface gave ample space for the vast hosts which met there on that far-off July day. To reach the plateau was the problem before Alfonso.
The Oretani, then neighbours, occupied the country lying between the sources of the Baetis and the Anas, or what are now called the Guadalquiver and Guadiana. In a part of Orospeda they deduced their name from a city called Oretum, the site of which has been brought to light in a paltry village to which the name of Oreto still remains.
Amen. Afterwards, Don Alfonso VII. gave us eight towns on the other side of the Guadalquiver, several ovens, two castles, the salt works of Belinchon, and a tenth of all the money coined in Toledo, for the vestments of the prebendaries. The VIII. of the name showered on the Cathedral a perfect rain of gifts, towns, villages, and mills.
The country on either side of the Guadalquivir to a considerable distance took its name from the city, being called Tartessis. It was immensely productive. "The wide plains through which the Guadalquiver flows produced the finest wheat, yielding an increase of a hundredfold; the oil and the wine, the growth of the hills, were equally distinguished for their excellence.
Night had set in, and most of the shops were closed and the streets almost deserted as we crossed the Guadalquiver bridge, and went on to the outskirts of the town. The house we entered was by no means a palace. A child opened the door, and disappeared when the gipsy said some words to it in the Romany tongue.
Here mile after mile, the Guadalquiver, spread through vast plains of tall grass and wild flowers, which sweeps away from you on either hand in a sea of billowy green touched with purple and crimson, gleams now and then where the tall flowers grow thickest, and swayed by the wind till the waving grass seems to heave and roll like the ocean itself.
The beauty of Seville is proverbial. "Who has not seen Seville, has not seen a wonder of loveliness," say the Spaniards. They are proud indeed of Seville, as they are of everything else belonging to them, and of themselves especially, often with less reason. We must carry the reader back about three hundred years, to a beautiful mansion not far from the banks of the famed Guadalquiver.
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