The far distant shore 11


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page 40  Irving's words above seem to be about something really "great" to reflect and speculate on, as do famous words about Stonehenge such as: "… carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period". The importance of the tower in Toledo had been emphasised in the early 19 th century by British poets like Walter Scott and Robert Southey. The latter wrote in a note: "The story of the Enchanted Tower at Toledo is well known to every English reader".

If many Spanish historians were somewhat in love with an unreal tower in Toledo, at least one Spanish novelist was really struck by a real tower in Ibiza, Torre des Savinar. This is one of the most beautiful of the defence towers, all built between 16 th and 18 th centuries, and the one which faces Es Vedrà. In 1908 Vicente Blasco Ibáñez visited Ibiza and wrote a novel about a man who lived in that tower most of his life. It is said that he finished the novel in just three days. The following excerpts from the novel, translated into English with the title The Dead Command, begin with a description of reefs and fish where the use of colours might be reminiscent of Syd's style, e.g. in his song "Terrapin", but here among the colours there are even... "transparencies of opal": In the glow of this stormy light Jaime contemplated the fluctuation of the waters at his feet, hurling their boisterous swirls into the hollows of the rock, roaring and writhing, frothing with anger in the winding passages between the reefs. In the depths of this greenish mass, illuminated by the setting sun with transparencies of opal, he saw strange vegetation growing on the rocks, diminutive forests among whose clinging fronds moved animals of fantastic form, nervous and swift or torpid and sedentary, with hard carapaces, gray and pinkish, bristling with defenses, armed with tentacles, with lances and with horns, making war among themselves and persecuting the weaker creatures which passed like white exhalations, flashing like crystal in the rapidity of their flight. …

He felt better in the shadow of the tower; no friend was near to disturb him, and he could freely compose the verses of a romance for the next dance in the town of San Antonio. …

He was still living in the Pirate's Tower; he was still in the midst of darkness, of solitude peopled with whispers of Nature, in the interior of a cube of stone, the walls of which seemed to sweat dark mystery. … — Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Dead Command  sources → Ibáñez, Vicente Blasco. The Dead Command. Trans. Frances Douglas. New York: Duffield & Company, 1919. 235, 155, 319. Print. http://www.archive.org/stream/deadcommand00blasiala#page/234/mode/2up [#page/154/mode/2up] [#page/318/mode/2up]