The sardine is to Portugal what the banana is to Costa Rica. These sardine peddlers wear a special tin hat, in which they carry their fish basket. To keep water from running down the back of their necks, their tin hats are fitted with gutters. The man under the window is using his tin hat to sit on. AS MOORISH AS THE SKYLINE OF MASKAT OR MECCA Long ago the Moors were driven from Iberia; but even to-day, in North Africa, they fight their ancient foes. An old Moorish castle at Cintra. HUNTING FOR WORM-HOLES IN CABBAGE: LEIRIA The colewort, or cabbage, family is popular in Portugal. Cabbage, dried codfish, and potatoes are a favorite peasant dish. Even the rich of Lisbon come north to the Minho in summer to cool off and eat "caldo verde," or soup with greens. The man wears one of the stocking caps in which Portuguese peasants often carry their money. A CAPACITY LOAD, BUT VERY LIGHT Portugal makes wine and seals it with her own corks. In the Algarve district vast forests of cork oaks abound. Here the cutting and export of cork is a large industry. WHAT A WELL-DRESSED LISBON DONKEY MAY WEAR Rum, gasoline, olive oil, kerosene, and vinegar-about every household liquid except iced tea and hair tonic-are carried as deck cargo by this peddler's mechanical-looking mule. In many European countries housewives buy only a day's allowance of fuel and foodstuffs, such as one or two eggs or a few sticks of wood at a time. On the wooded heights above the town of Cintra, north of Lisbon, stands Pena Castle. From it one gets an amazing panoramic picture of the Tagus and surrounding country. While many Portuguese castles are in ruins, this one, owned by the government and formerly used by the royal family, is kept in excellent repair. Moors regarding the possible circumnavigation of Africa, which had been accomplished by Phoenician adventurers about 600 B. C., and attempted by the Carthaginian Admiral Hanno, sailing south from the Strait of Gibraltar, at a later period. By 1460, when Prince Henry died at Sagres, his enthusiasm and guiding hand had sent the Portuguese flag down 1,500 miles of the West African coast. I have seen Prince Henry's portrait in an old manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris-an earnest, intelligent face, clean-shaven save for the closely cropped mustache. He wears the wide-brimmed black hat portrayed by Dutch painters of that period. Affonso Henriques, Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Camoëns are the four biggest names in Portuguese history. Affonso Henriques was the George Washington of his country: Camoëns was the singer of the days of Portugal's maritime glory, Vasco da Gama the sung; but it was Prince Henry who blew life into the sails. So I thought as I stood at nightfall on the bold Sagres headland, looking up at the star-lit blue of the heavens and down on the surging sea. A Tiny Principality Which the Visitor May Encompass in a Single View Affords Adventurous Climbs Among Steep Pastures and Quaint Villages BY MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS AUTHOR OF "CZECHOSLOVAKIA, THE KEY-LAND TO CENTRAL EUROPE," "LATVIA, HOME OF THE LETTS," "THE I' With Illustrations from Photographs by the Author F YOU are a map traveler, Liechtenstein-bound, follow the castled Rhine, skirt the Black Forest to Basel, swing east past the Falls to the shed at Friedrichshafen, where Uncle Sam's Zeppelin, the Los Angeles, was built, and you are on the Lake of Constance, or Bodensee, shared by Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Turn south for 20 miles up the broad valley between Switzerland and Austria and you reach the northern tip of the Principality of Liechtenstein, which for the next 15 miles looks west across the Rhine. To reach Liechtenstein in person requires self-discipline. One must leave Paris and Switzerland behind and stop short of Vienna and Budapest. Forego an evening in Paris, be aboard the Budapest sleeper just before 9 and before lunch time you will arrive at Buchs. In the station the Babel of tongues was being systematized by linguistic hybrids who translated confusion into sense. Yet the queue stopped so long that the express snorted impatiently. Then we moved on. "My word!" ejaculated the man in front of me. "It was a Dutchman trying to talk Esperanto to the booking clerk." "You people don't care to learn new languages," objected another Esperanto delegate, still aggressively enthusiastic after a Zurich convention in favor of a common medium of expression. "But here in Central Europe we do."* We rolled across an imposing canal, passed over the Rhine, and, after two miles, stopped. * See, also, "The Battle-Line of Languages in Central Europe," by A. L. Guerard, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for February, 1923. "No one gets out here," proclaimed the conductor. He was misinformed. I saw my trunk outside, noticed the name "Schaan-Vaduz" on the station, salvaged my suitcase and camera, and dropped from the moving train into Liechtenstein. To the right the narrow plain between mile-high mountains and the Rhine stretched away toward Sargans, off the south tip of the Lilliputian land. To the left was the "low country." The express had tossed me off at the division line between Schellenberg and Vaduz, once separate units, and fiefs of the Roman Empire. One who thinks of the Principality as a part of the Swiss Customs Union expects this small mountain-side State to be west of the Rhine, leaning against St. Gallen instead of hanging to the shoulder of Vorarlberg. But political changes hardle a river easier than mile-high mountains do. Until 1919, free Liechtenstein was economically allied to Austria. The "K. K.,” denoting Kaiser and King, on the Schaan post office, though partly obliterated, is still visible. Here the Rhine is no romantic river for deep-water sailors, with a prima donna mermaid parading her tresses before bobbed-haired tourists. It is a shallow, stony torrent bed, now dry in spots, now foaming with the force of Alpine glaciers. Man has taken the river in hand, overcome its meandering habits, and confined it between prosaic, though curving, banks.* Between the Rhine and the sway-back ridge of Liechtenstein is a narrow plain * See, also, "Rediscovering the Rhine: A Trip by Barge from the Sea to the Headwaters of Europe's Storied Stream," by Melville Chater, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for July, 1925. |