A “CURIOSITY”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 946, 12 April 1930, Page 29

A “CURIOSITY”

FATE OF GIBRALTAR Almost unwritten and unsung in these days, it is said, Gibraltar yet remains one of the curiosities of the world. Its character is simple enough in outline, we are told, a fortress, a settlement of soldiers and traders, a garden, a mountain of rock. But, as a special correspondent of the London “Observer” saw the great rock, he visioned the modern fortress in the setting of the TEneid. And he tells us that there is a freakishness, a secret laughter about the place, “for long the last home of wild monkeys in Europe.” On the very landing-stage, he writes, stood a Spanish figure with the head and eyes and features of a Spanish player—a policeman crowned with the Victorian English helmet and wearing a dark blue coat. At the end of the. mole was a tea shop, built like English seaside tea shops except that the signs it bore were in English and in Spanish. This informant continues: “Everywhere about the streets — streets with names like Irish Towns—there are outworks of redoubts and Army storehouses, sober and dull enough. “There are churches and chapels—a Wesleyan chapel and a Salvation j Army barracks built on this rock of j ages, an Anglican cathedral, the odd- | est church I have ever seen, its date i about 1840, its style a cross between | a rnosque and a Turkish bath. “I walked past the Governor’s j house, some time a Franciscan con- ! vent, a neat place, with the faintest. ! suggestion of Spanish extravagance. “In this quarter streets were named ■ for the most part after ramps, re- | doubts, and generals, i “The most prominent ornaments I were guns—fat guns, lean guns, long • guns, short guns, young guns, old | guns, brass guns, well-polished, black, | wrinkled, toothless guns. Cannon-balls were almost as common as statues in the public garden : of Paris. • “I walked a little wearily past all { this ordnance until I came to a double ; gate; above one arch were the arms j of England—copied exactly from the j official sheets of foolscap some time j in the ISSO’s; above the stone were j cut the imperial arms of Charles j V.” I Beyond this gate, this journalistic explorer of Gibraltar found a small ! graveyard, set below the road, bounded by low walls, an old bastion. The | name, he tells us, was arresting enough: Trafalgar Cemetery.