A quiet pilgrimage

Women Trav­ellers in Cata­lan Lands

We crept through the nar­row streets of Pol­lensa town, only a shade less des­o­late than usual in the bright morn­ing, and im­me­di­ately be­yond seemed to tra­verse one of those old heroic pic­tures of clas­sic land­scape, as we shot under the monastery of Nues­tra Señora del Puig tow­er­ing up on her high rock. The round­about road on the flat lay through the fa­mil­iar Puebla and Inca, and the very beau­ti­ful un­fa­mil­iar vil­lage of Selva, where the colour of the lemons seemed more than usu­ally lovely against the old ivory houses; then it climbed up and up through steep, washed ter­races on the other side of those peaks that we had watched ap­pear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing from the boat in Pol­lensa Bay.

Lluch lies not in a cup, but in a saucer, among the very peaks. It lies, that is, not in a steep close hol­low, but in a plateau, swing­ing like a great, gen­tly-sag­ging cloth be­tween the tops of the moun­tains. It was beau­ti­ful, through very un­ex­pect­ed­ness, to find it not a lit­tle steep build­ing cling­ing to a windy apex, but a great wide set­tle­ment. The inner walls were rem­i­nis­cent half of cas­tle, half of farm-house, and the arched stone gate­way, ad­mit­ting to the solid dig­ni­fied façade of the monastery, looked out through a row of trees upon a vast court­yard of cob­bles and grass, with a foun­tain in the mid­dle and low build­ings lin­ing the sides. Since it was only mid­day of the vigil, we were the first pil­grims to ar­rive. [...]

The monastery was also a guest-house on a grand-scale, mak­ing pro­vi­sion for pil­grims jour­ney­ing from the lim­its of the is­land. The long build­ing fac­ing the court was en­tirely taken up with guest-rooms, and one side of the court­yard oc­cu­pied with an ar­cade of very po­et­i­cal bil­lets for guest-don­keys or mules. Op­po­site them were the dwellings of what pop­u­la­tion the monastery sup­ported, with two tiny shops like tuck-shops, in the care of or­tho­dox spec­ta­cled old women, and filled with the or­tho­dox an­cient ed­i­bles in glass jars. Be­hind the guest-house was a beau­ti­ful inner court, with a hedge and gar­den, re­call­ing the court of an Eng­lish col­lege. There was no sign of human habi­ta­tion any­where, only a savoury smell of fry­ing and onions which in­di­cated an arroz and drove us out rather en­vi­ously to our self-brought lunch on the hill-side.

It is beau­ti­ful to sit among the peaks that one has watched prick­ing the sky from below, and beau­ti­ful to see how the very last earth cling­ing pre­car­i­ously to the rock still per­sis­tently teems and flow­ers. Every brown hand­ful in a crack was a tiny fresh gar­den, blest often with vi­o­lets or just-bud­ding white cy­cla­mens, and ilex trees seemed every­where to spring out of crevices in the sheer rock. The fa­mil­iar grey rock and green grass, olive and ilex, took a strange­ness from the peaks them­selves, for the sides of these were every­where by a ge­o­log­i­cal freak math­e­mat­i­cally scored in straight deep grooves. It was ex­actly as if a giant had worked painstak­ingly over every face of up­right rock on the land­scape with an elec­tric drill. [...]

In the late af­ter­noon, ap­prised of human oc­cu­pa­tion by the sight of a very old man in a goat-skin and a very young boy in a sailor-suit and a bou­quet of vi­o­lets, we sought out a lit­tle round lay sac­ristan with keys and told him our plans. He seemed de­lighted to en­ter­tain us, and gave us bed-cov­er­ings out of a room where there were larger presses and more linen than the greed­i­est house-wife ever dreamed. He also in­sisted that we should need a guide and a mule for Soller, and un­der­took to pro­duce them both. In the evening we ate our meal in the fonda of the monastery, in com­pany with a troop of boy cy­clists and waited on by the sec­ond fault­lessly beau­ti­ful woman we had seen in the is­land. She was not fair, like our Iphi­ge­nia, but of pure dark colour­ing with curved fea­tures, one of those in whom a touch of Africa seemed to have sur­vived through the cen­turies. She moved grace­fully, shawled and hooded, round the bare table, and lent a bib­li­cal beauty to the meal. Af­ter­wards we walked again in the di­vine, keen air among the strange peaks and the olives over which the moon was fling­ing a beauty holier and older than bib­li­cal, and heard the frogs in the still­ness in­stead of the sheep-bells. Over the pure up­lifted land­scape with its night scents and sounds was the still sa­cred­ness of a vigil; only no feast could dawn in beauty fit­ting to suc­ceed it.