I could keep its beauty for ever. Could it be more lovely, more enchanting, more mysterious under a white sun shining from out a motionless blue heaven? Who shall say? Old! Old! Kissed by the winds of centuries, Santo Domingo rests upon the brow of a verdant plateau, and stretches its sinuous arms dreamily beyond the hills on the shore. Great red rocks, in whose rifts glossy ferns and graceful vines have sought safe harbour, break the roll of the sea into a thousand glistening clouds of spray, enveloping the summit of the cliff in a translucent mist. Like a weather-worn, decrepit, but stately warrior, the ancient fort, with massive towers and mossy turrets and bastions and broken walls, still holds its guard over the harbour; and as we passed from the sea into the placid Ozama River, the enchanting view of Santo Domingo arose in full sight. Cloaked in a faintly shimmering mist, under a gray, tumultuous sky, the ancient city rose to greet us as a dreamy, nebulous siren of the sea. Crumbling ruins of ancient stone stairways led from the fort through a water-gate to the river; down those mossy flights I could all but see a gay troop of Spanish cavaliers approaching their quaint old galleons moored hard by. Truly it was an enchanted city; asleep, untouched by the hand of man since the days of its first great builder; asleep, moss-grown, hoary, throbbing still with the dying passion of mediævalism.
II.
Contrary to our prearranged plan, we decided, upon landing, to engage a carriage. Just why, I hardly knew, but there was a subtle power at work in the mind of one of our party, and although it has never been hinted at since then, in calmly going over that carriage-hiring I think I begin to read the riddle. We had left our French at Haïti, and this was our first experiment on this voyage with Spanish, and I suspect some of us were anxious to see how Cervantes’s language—la idioma Castellana—would work when it came to such a common-place proceeding as the hiring of a carriage.
We came off with colours flying, and took seats in a vehicle made some twenty-five or fifty years ago (quite modern as compared with those of Port-au-Prince), bumped up the steep stony hill, under an old archway, and had our first glimpse of the solid Spanish architecture of Santo Domingo. Everything was interesting; the balconies upheld by graceful supports of wrought iron; the neat appearance of the low-roofed, white and blue washed houses; the ever-beautiful palms and banana groves seen in vistas across the river; even our driver was a source of interest, for I expended my entire vocabulary of Spanish—few words indeed—upon that youth, all to no purpose. All he did was to look dazed and answer, “Si, señora” to everything, hit or miss, until we came to the Cathedral, when, just to make it right with my conscience for having been the innocent cause of all his awful lies, I asked him, pointing to the building, which could be nothing in the mind of a sane man but a cathedral, if that was the Cathedral, and he said: “Si, señora,” and I felt relieved.
No description can convey to your mind an adequate impression of the beauty of this wonderful old cathedral, for one needs colour, colour, colour, everywhere for its proper setting. It is built of the yellowest of soft porous stone, to which time has bequeathed a luminosity, the brilliancy of which no language can rightly picture. It is purely Spanish in its style, depending for its beauty entirely on its symmetry of form and not on extraneous ornamentation; it is built rather low to withstand frequent earthquakes, and from its solidity and simplicity and directness of construction has a charm which few of the later Spanish cathedrals possess. Time has laid her kindly hands upon this temple of God gently—ever so gently, and through many a lifetime has fulfilled the priestly office of consecration.
I sat down in the shade, for, as we left the carriage, a big cloud tumbled over by mistake and the sun laughingly plunged headlong through the mist before the quarrelsome elements had time to gainsay. With Little Blue Ribbons close by, and Sister and our Spanish Student disappearing within the arches of the Cathedral, I sat there on the base of one of the great pillars at the doorway, and filled my eyes with the beauty of the strong, graceful arches overhead, in whose time-worn curves hung the ancient bells, beautiful bronze bells, now green with age, still pealing forth the praise of God as in the days of Columbus’s followers.
Down the weather-worn and sun-ripened sides of the Cathedral were long streaks of black, like the silent tears of centuries, shed for glories now no more. Was it not enough to rest there, where one could look at the bells and wait for the quiver of the long tongues, ringing out the hour of mass, and catch the thrill of the mottled gray and blue sky sifting its mellow light through the ancient towers? There are some things so absolutely satisfying that it seems an arrant sacrilege to be discontent and want for more. But Little Blue Ribbons, with the impatience of childhood, began to tug at my hand, and the dear old bells must have gone asleep, for with all our longing they hung there covered by their deep, green silence, and Little Blue Ribbons said we would have our waiting all for nothing. For nothing is it, dear one, to forget the stress of living for awhile, and let one’s spirit drop into the peace of a sleeping bell?
III.
We found that the interior of the Cathedral had a very new, clean face, having been recently “restored” and whitewashed; thus being out of harmony with the venerable exterior; however, some one remarked, it was “gratifying to see that the Dominicans appreciate their ancient monument.” That complacent remark struck the ear awry, like the whine of a deacon’s report at a Sunday-school convention. Appreciate? Why, the people of Santo Domingo worship this spot! It is the one place of interest to them; it is the one thing they ask the stranger if he has seen; it is the centre of their life and love—that ancient pile of yellow glory—for are not the ashes of their great Cristobal Colon guarded there? Would that we Americans had any relic we held as sacredly!
So I suppose we ought not to quarrel with the Dominicans over the new coat of whitewash, for they meant it well, but we can at least wish they hadn’t cleaned house so thoroughly. Within those walls rest the bones of Columbus after their many disinterments and post-mortem wanderings—so it is claimed; but whether these are the bones of Columbus, or of some one else, who can say? What does it matter? Somewhere about one hundred years ago—in 1795—’tis said, when this island was ceded to the French, the Spaniards took Columbus’s bones back to Spain. Later these mortal fragments were returned to Santo Domingo, in accordance with his expressed wish that they finally be buried in this his beloved birthplace and funeral-pyre of his cherished hopes in the New World; which wish had been once before honoured in the first removal of the remains to the then Spanish colony. Sealed in a leaden casket they were imbedded in masonry under the stone floor of the cathedral chancel, and there was no attempt to disturb them until about 1878, when they were presumably removed to Havana to be re-interred there, and, as the Spaniards stoutly maintain, again disinterred from their resting-place in the cathedral at Havana and hurried away to Spain just before the American occupation of Cuba, there to receive the sad honour of a costly
