Luna Benamor

Luna Benamor, by Vicente
Blasco Ibáñez

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Title: Luna Benamor
Author: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Translator: Isaac Goldberg
Release Date: June 19, 2007 [EBook #21870]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUNA
BENAMOR ***

Produced by Chuck Greif

LUNA BENAMOR
BY

VICENTE BLASCO IBÁÑEZ
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL SPANISH BY
ISAAC GOLDBERG
JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY
BOSTON 1919

CONTENTS
LUNA BENAMOR, A Novel
THE TOAD
COMPASSION
LUXURY
RABIES
THE WINDFALL
THE LAST LION

LUNA BENAMOR

I
LUIS AGUIRRE had been living in Gibraltar for about a month. He
had arrived with the intention of sailing at once upon a vessel bound for
Oceanica, where he was to assume his post as a consul to Australia. It
was the first important voyage of his diplomatic career. Up to that time
he had served in Madrid, in the offices of the Ministry, or in various

consulates of southern France, elegant summery places where for half
the year life was a continuous holiday. The son of a family that had
been dedicated to diplomacy by tradition, he enjoyed the protection of
influential persons. His parents were dead, but he was helped by his
relatives and the prestige of a name that for a century had figured in the
archives of the nation. Consul at the age of twenty-five, he was about to
set sail with the illusions of a student who goes out into the world for
the first time, feeling that all previous trips have been insignificant.
Gibraltar, incongruous and exotic, a mixture of races and languages,
was to him the first sign of the far-off world in quest of which he was
journeying. He doubted, in his first surprise, if this rocky land jutting
into the open sea and under a foreign flag, could be a part of his native
peninsula. When he gazed out from the sides of the cliff across the vast
blue bay with its rose-colored mountains dotted by the bright
settlements of La Línea, San Roque and Algeciras,--the cheery
whiteness of Andalusian towns,--he felt convinced that he was still in
Spain. But great difference distinguished the human groups camped
upon the edge of this horseshoe of earth that embraced the bay. From
the headland of Tarifa to the gates of Gibraltar, a monotonous unity of
race; the happy warbling of the Andalusian dialect; the broad-brimmed
hat; the mantilla about the women's bosoms and the glistening hair
adorned with flowers. On the huge mountain topped by the British flag
and enclosing the oriental part of the bay, a seething cauldron of races,
a confusion of tongues, a carnival of costume: Hindus, Mussulmen,
English, Hebrews, Spanish smugglers, soldiers in red coats, sailors
from every nation, living within the narrow limits of the fortifications,
subjected to military discipline, beholding the gates of the
cosmopolitan sheepfold open with the signal at sunrise and close at the
booming of the sunset gun. And as the frame of this picture, vibrant
with its mingling of color and movement, a range of peaks, the
highlands of Africa, the Moroccan mountains, stretched across the
distant horizon, on the opposite shore of the strait; here is the most
crowded of the great marine boulevards, over whose blue highway
travel incessantly the heavily laden ships of all nationalities and of all
flags; black transatlantic steamers that plow the main in search of the
seaports of the poetical Orient, or cut through the Suez Canal and are

lost in the isle-dotted immensities of the Pacific.
To Aguirre, Gibraltar was a fragment of the distant Orient coming
forward to meet him; an Asiatic port wrenched from its continent and
dragged through the waves to run aground on the coast of Europe, as a
sample of life in remote countries.
He was stopping at a hotel on Royal Street, a thoroughfare that winds
about the mountain,--that vertebral column of the city to which lead,
like thin threads, the smaller streets in ascending or descending slope.
Every morning he was startled from his sleep by the noise of the
sunrise gun,--a dry, harsh discharge from a modern piece, without the
reverberating echo of the old cannon. The walls trembled, the floors
shook, window panes and curtains palpitated, and a few moments later
a noise was heard in the street, growing gradually louder; it was the
sound of a hurrying flock, the dragging of thousands of feet, the buzz of
conversations carried on in a low voice along