OCR Text |
Show NICARAGUA SCENERY Viewing Leon From Cathedral Towers ' j Massive Building Portraits of De- j ceased Prelates Since 1527 Volcanic 1 Mountains Cold and Noiseless Effects J ! of Revolutionists' Rapacity Indignant j at Sad Condition History Repeats Itself . j Times Change and Renovate All Things. J "There stood the hills not far. who-e gri.ly tp- Belched fire and rolling nioke. The work of sulphur." I Leon is a most attractive eity with tine gardens, fine public buildings, and a very affable and ap- j . proachable people. I was told that the view from I the cathedral tower was superb, and as I wa.-t to leavH t the city the following morning. I to..k advantage of J the quiet Sunday afternoon to pass a couple of hours on the tower. The cathedral i-t a massive and I really magnificent, pile, unsurpassed by any build- ing in Latin America. It is a firm ras of ma- sonry. built of cut t--lie. whose mortared joints have. ! solidified into an imperishable material, forming. with the travertine, an indestruetable whole. It ! I dignity and grace and quiet grandeur have given a ' new glory and importance t material substance. ? and brings home to tin mind the sublime faith of j the builders who raised this imperishable temple to an imperishable God. It covers an entire square, f took thirty-seven years of incessant labor to build, and cost. I am told, five million dollars. Under a ) great dome, whose figured windows flood it with ;i wealth and variety of chromatic coloring, repose- j the high altar of variegated marble, elaborately : carved. The paneling of the altar is of silver plates, ; f chased and embossed. The beautiful side chape-Is the railings of Spanish marble, its lofty ceiling. ! and its great bells, mellowed with age, give to this , consecrated fane an immortality of quiet, grandeur ; and sacred romance. , In a spacious room opening into the vestry and known as the Bishop's hall, arc hung the portraits if in oil of all the prelates of Nicaragua, beginning f with the saintly Valdivieso, the Thomas a Becket : . : i of Central America, and ending with the present ''.' occupant of the See of Leon, Alanseigneur Pereira f y Castellon, the forty-fourth since, the foundation ol the diocese in lo2. Some of these portraits are ; the productions of famous foreign artists, and even those of the native portrait painters hole- your attention at-tention for a time. It is a room of historic memo- ; ' ries : "Where dedicated shapes of saints. Stern faces, bleared with unwearied watch. Look down, benignly grave, and seem to say, Ye come and go incessant, we remain ' : Safe in the hallowed emiet of the past, I ' ' Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, ' '. Of faith so nobly realized as this." These paintings, if they had a voice, could tell ' ; the history of Central America from tho conquest, ; until now. They could record the heroic self-sacrifice of the Spanish missionary fathers, who gave- ',' themselves to the splendid task of bearing life, and hope, and decency to the Pueblo tribes and roaming roam-ing hordes from Patagonia to Xew Alexico. Dur- ' ing the civil wars this cathedral was perverted inte a fortress, and to this day every foot of its western west-ern wall shows the marks of bullets, and records .' . : the miserable marksmanship of the Xicaraguans. ; ' ; The rapacity of the revolutionists despoiled it of its '; '. ornaments and contributary wealth, their contempt; for the House of God covering even the altar of sacrifice, which they stripped of its silver panels and candlesticks. From the majestic towers of this imposing min- ' ster the view is magnificent. Xine of the twenty- - ; four volcanic mountains of Nicaragua cut the horizon hori-zon towards tho Pacific ocean and were sharply outlined against a background of delicate sky-blue. These destroyers of long ago are now cold, and voiceless, but troubled in their sleep, and make known ominously, by the rising sulphurous; smoke? and the steam escaping from their cavernous depths, the fires blazing within them and the heat, and power smouldering in their craters. The jaws of the monsters are yet foul with black gore, their shaggy ridges and huge lava muscles bearing witness wit-ness to their desolating strength. Dominating all is the awful antiquity of what you are looking at a sensation, as of old. finding utterance in that tremendous tre-mendous question of Eliphaz the Temanite to the uphappy Job. "Wast thou brought forth before tho . hills f There was about them a weirdness that ap- proached the ghostly and almost the ghastly. The last great eruption of Alasaya. the nearest to the city, happened about two hundred years ago, t v and so the people laugh at you if you speak of dan- ger to come. They forget that two hundred years J in the earth's life are but as two minutes in the life. ? of man, and that what a man did two minutes since? , he may do again. From our position we looked, ' down upon the Cuartel General or army headquarters, headquar-ters, the governor's residence, the bishop's palace, and the Tridentine College of St. Ramoan. estab- ; lished two hundred and thirty years ago. We could !, see the" sentries pacing back and forth before the government house and the general's quarters, tho people in the plaza, and a long line of burros or i donkeys freighted with fodder for the cavalry sta-bles. sta-bles. Up through the lambent air there came" to us ' : strange noises, indefinable, sounds, heard only by ' ' ' those lifted above a large city. Far away to the : east and the northeast as far as the eye could carry were the daik blue waters of the Pacific, and between be-tween it and us were the wonderful forests of mahogany, ma-hogany, the great cattle ranches, and the hacienda? ' of the land owners. We could see as we looked ! southward the auroele of strangely beautiful palms around the lake of Alanagua, the orange groves, and coffee plantations, the cabins of the farm '' hands clustering into villages. It was well on in the afternoon when we left tho j tower, and as theun sank lower, the west changed to crimson, bringing out the royal palms of Alanagua Alana-gua in bold relief against the sky. Xow dipped tho sun behind the horizon, a horizon of rich, golden, Continued on Pago 5. j NICARAGUA SCENERY. (Continued from Page One.) salmon-pink, merging into the deep blue of turquoise, tur-quoise, and then into the cold gray of evening through which the stars shone with strange and almost material lustre. When we returned to our hotel a feeling of indignation in-dignation against the men and conditions which made desolate this splendid but unhappy land struggled strug-gled within us for mastery over the great wave of sympathy which swept in upon us in favor of the Mcaraguans. Sooner or later, we felt, things will change for the better. Was not England, during the war of the Roses, more wretchedly circumstanced circum-stanced than Nicaragua today? Did not the wretchedness of her people excite the "weariness and disgust" of the historian Green, who was constrained con-strained to say of the waring elements: "Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons, seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which they fought, and the utter want of all nobleness and chivalry in the savage prolongation of the war?" Does not Motley in his "Dutch Republic," paint a shocking picture of the horrible conditions of human hu-man life in The Netherlands during the civil wars of the eighteenth century? Was not Germany almost al-most in the throes of dissolution when, from 1631 to 1640, one million two hundred thousand of her people perished of war and famine? Is it so very long ago since the Teutonic states of Germany were torn into fragments, and distributed by that monstrous mon-strous adventurer, or, if you will, that providential man, Napoleon Bonaparte, among his blood relations rela-tions or conquering generals? These kingdoms recovered re-covered themselves. They were jeered at, laughed at, despised or pitied by all Europe in their misfortune. misfor-tune. Look at them now. What assurance then have we that a brighter day is not soon to dawn for Nicaragua and all Central America? Or what assurance as-surance have we that our own United States, one hundred years from now, may not be dismembered and shorn of its prosperity, its glory and colossal strength ? |