Near as it is to the city, it stands entirely
alone. The instinct of aggregation is so powerful in this people that
the old towns have no environs, no houses sprinkled in the outlying
country, like modern cities. Every one must be huddled inside the walls.
If a solitary house, like this castle, is built without, it must be in
itself an impregnable fortress. This fine old ruin, in obedience to this
instinct of jealous distrust, has but one entrance, and that so narrow
that Sir John Falstaff would have been embarrassed to accept its
hospitalities. In the shade of the broken walls, grass-grown and gay
with scattered poppies, I looked at Toledo, fresh and clear in the early
day. On the extreme right lay the new spick-and-span bull-ring, then the
great hospice and Chapel of St. John the Baptist, the Convent of the
Immaculate Conception, and next, the Latin cross of the Chapel of Santa
Cruz, whose beautiful fagade lay soft in shadow; the huge arrogant bulk
of the Alcazar loomed squarely before me, hiding half the view; to the
left glittered the slender spire of the Cathedral, holding up in the
pure air that emblem of august resignation, the triple crown of thorns;
then a crowd of cupolas, ending at last near the river-banks with the
sharp angular mass of San Cristobal. The field of vision was filled with
churches and chapels, with the palaces of the king and the monk. Behind
me the waste lands went rolling away untilled to the brown Toledo
mountains.
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