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Updated: July 13, 2025
After this triumph, the interment of the sprat was performed with a splendour never witnessed before. The whole city attended the procession; there were thousands of coaches and vehicles of every description, besides an incredible variety of masked characters; guitars and castanets resounded for more than twelve hours on the pradera adjoining the Manzanares.
Now and then the booming of gongs floated off to us, and the squeaking of a curious kind of pipe; while from the boats close in shore the twangling, twingling sound of the native guitars was very plain from one in particular, where there was evidently some kind of entertainment, it being lit up with a number of lanterns of grotesque shapes.
Away out in the land that once was old Provence, we jested and sang the hours away, the women with their guitars and mandolines the men with their wild dances and tambourines, and love was the keynote of the music love! always love! Love in the sunshine! love under the moonbeams! bright eyes in which to drown one's soul, red lips on which to crush one's heart!
The steeps appeared still more dangerous than they really were; and, during six hours of continual descent, we seemed to be always equally near the farms at the foot of the Silla. We heard very distinctly the voices of men and the notes of guitars. We did not arrive till ten at night at the bottom of the valley.
Christ, seated on the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel, St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers.
He was conscious, through this, of the ceaseless playing of the guitars, strains of jotas and malagueñas, laden with the seductiveness, the fascination, of sensuous warm life.
They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios. They flashed them in the light of their torches; they baited us to bargain with them. It was a Venetian fete with a vengeance; for the hawkers were sometimes more impertinent than polite. It was a feast of lanterns, and not without the accompaniment of guitars and castanets, and rich, soft voices. After that we were eager for the end of it all.
The wondrous ships, the pretty little schooners, where the foreign-looking sailors lay on long moonlight nights, singing to their guitars and telling great stories, all these things and more could Titee tell of.
With night things grew more compact. From twilight till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over its several hills, watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful.
Every one was dressed in his best, paying and receiving visits, giving and receiving presents, parading the streets with horns, guitars, and flutes, whilst groupes of men and women were seen seated under the shade at their doors, or under trees, drinking wabum or booza.
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