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advertising
ri
a cultural economy

advertising
a cultural economy
Unlike most accounts of advertising which rely on textual analysis,

advertising
this text offers readers an understanding of the historical and
material practices of the advertising industry.

Advertising offers a unique platform for addressing central debates about

cultural and economic life. However, Liz McFall argues that analysis has so far
failed to engage with the production and consumption of adverts, and that a
re-think of our understanding of advertising is long overdue.

This book

Liz McFall
• Outlines the history behind the current diversity of adverts and their
production
• Examines the material practices of the advertising industry
• Shows how adverts have been indelibly shaped by the interaction between
key cultural forces, organisations and technology.

Advertising: A Cultural Economy provides a much-needed framework for the

study of advertising for students of Media & Communications, Consumer
Studies, Sociology, and Popular Culture.

Liz McFall is a lecturer at the Open University.

Front cover photograph by Edward Nicholl © August 2003 and

reproduced with the kind permission of Brenda Lever.

ISBN 0-7619-4255-6

L I Z M c F A L L
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi 9 780761 942559
www.sagepublications.com
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page i

advertising

a cultural economy
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page ii

Culture, Representation and Identities is dedicated to a particular understanding

of ‘cultural studies’ as an inherently interdisciplinary project critically concerned
with the analysis of meaning. The series focuses attention on the importance
of the contemporary ‘cultural turn’ in forging a radical re-think of the centrality
of ‘the cultural’ and the articulation between the material and the symbolic in
social analysis. One aspect of this shift is the expansion of ‘culture’ to a much
wider, more inclusive range of institutions and practices, including those con-
ventionally termed ‘economic’ and ‘political’.

Paul du Gay is at the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University.

Stuart Hall is Emeritus Professor at The Open University and Visiting Professor
at Goldsmiths College, the University of London.

Books in the series:

Representing Black Britain

Black and Asian Images on Television
Sarita Malik

Cultural Economy
Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life
Edited by Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke

Advertising Cultures
Gender, Commerce, Creativity
Sean Nixon

Advertising
A Cultural Economy
Liz McFall
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page iii

advertising
a cultural economy

Liz McFall

SAGE Publications
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page iv

© Liz McFall 2004

First published 2004

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research

or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this
publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted
in any form, or by any means, only with the prior
permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of
reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms
of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms
should be sent to the publishers.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders

of the material re-printed herein, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

SAGE Publications Ltd

1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc.

2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

B-42, Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 100 017

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN 0-7619-4254-8
ISBN 0-7619-4255-6 (pbk)

Library of Congress Control Number 2003110017

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page v

contents

List of illustrations vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: the quaint device of advertising 1

1 Colonising of the real 9

2 The persuasive subject of advertising 35

3 The hybridisation of culture and economy 61

4 The uses of history 89

5 Pervasive institutions and constituent practices 108

6 Persuasive products 153

7 Conclusion: devices and desires 188

Bibliography 195

Index 204

v
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page vi

list of illustrations

Figure 5.1: Railway Station Advertising 1874

(Source: extract from print in Sampson, 1874) 121
Figure 5.2: Fashions for Advertisers 1846
(Source: Punch’s Almanac, Vol. 10: 236, Jan.–Jun. 1846) 122
Figure 5.3: An 1826 Advertising Van
(Source: Sampson, 1874) 124
Figure 5.4: JWT headquarters in 1899
(Source: The Thompson Red Book on Advertising, 1899) 126
Figure 5.5: Sell’s Building 1908
(Source: The Propelling Power, SL43 Colour
Promotional Leaflet, 1908, HATa) 127
Figure 5.6: Typical Letterhead 1908
(Source: Sell’s Box, HATa) 128
Figure 5.7: Edward Steichen’s Advertisement for
Jergen’s Lotion 1923
(Source: Steichen, 1962) 136

Figure 6.1: 1820 Turner’s Blacking advertisement

(Source: Lysons’ collection, c103k11 vol. 4, BL) 162
Figure 6.2: Warren’s Blacking advertisement
drawn by Cruikshank
(Source: Elliot, 1962) 163
Figure 6.3: Advertising stunts to evade restrictions
on display
(Source: Presbrey, 1929) 165
Figure 6.4: Advertisement for the 1769 Shakespeare
Jubilee celebrations
(Source: Daniel, c.1860, c61, Reprinted with kind
permission of the British Library) 167
Figure 6.5: Duesbury & Co. Tradecard, 1799
(Source: Reprinted with kind permission of
John Johnson Collection Exhibitions 2001;
Tradecards 6 (20); Bodleian Library) 168
Figure 6.6: Panorama advertisement of the Flushing
of Malta exhibition
(Source: Lysons’ collection, c103k11, BL) 169

vi
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page vii

Figure 6.7: 1930s Advertisement for Chase & Sanborn’s tea

list of illustrations
(Source: Tea for Sale, Fortune, August 1935) 181
Figure 6.8: 1914 Woodbury’s Soap ‘emotional
appeal’ advertisement
(Reprinted with kind permission of Hartman
Center for Sales, Advertising and
Marketing History, Duke University) 183

vii
McFall-Prelims.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page viii

acknowledgements

It has taken quite some time for this book to emerge in its current form. To
those who have helped shape it along the way I owe thanks, not only for
their support and kindness, but also for their constancy. The book draws
substantially on doctoral research supervised by Paul du Gay and Margaret
Wetherall and I continue to be grateful for the training they provided and for
the mixture of patience, commitment, inspiration and energy that they
brought to the project. Paul du Gay in particular has been an ongoing and
indispensable source of ideas, debates and ‘damn fine’ coffee.
I would like to thank the Open University, especially the Sociology
Discipline and the Research School, for providing first the financial support
and later the research leave to enable the project to be completed. I also owe
thanks to those in the Open University in Scotland who encouraged me to
begin the project in the first place, Graham Dawson, Bram Gieben, Katla
Helgason and Gerry Mooney.
A non-historian conducting historical research into a subject as flimsy
and ephemeral as advertising relies upon the skills and expertise of archivists
and librarians. I am especially grateful to Michael Cudlipp and Margaret
Rose of the History of Advertising Trust in Norwich and to Ellen Gartrell of
the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke
University, North Carolina for generously granting me the space, time and
help to allow me to navigate my way through their extensive collections. I
am also grateful to staff at the British Library; the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford; the National Museum of American History at the
Smithsonian Institute and the Guildhall Library, London.
Many friends and colleagues discussed ideas with me, read drafts and
offered feedback. I want to thank in particular Daniel Miller, Sean Nixon,
Graeme Salaman and Alan Warde for their responses to earlier versions of
parts of this work. I also want to thank Rick Holliman, Sarah Seymour-
Smith and Ramaswami Harindranath among others for breaking into the
monotony just often enough to keep me sane while this was being written.
Special thanks are due to David Featherstone who has listened, read and
responded to numerous drafts with unstinting patience, generosity and
insight. Extraspecial thanks to the little people, Eavan and Marni, for
moderating my progress in the best possible way and to Linda Usherwood
(aka Mary Poppins). The book is dedicated to Stephen.

viii
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 1

introduction: the quaint

device of advertising

[T]he time of men does not have the form of an evolution but precisely that of a history.
(Foucault, 1981: 8)

An article in a 1652 issue of the Mercurius Mastix laments the appearance in

the press of yet another variation on the already extensive gamut of trade
announcements purporting to be ‘epistles’, ‘petitions’, ‘iterations’, or ‘news
from abroad’.1 This new variation is referred to only as a ‘quaint device in their
trading’, but it is clear that the object in question, though not yet known by that
term, was an early form of advertisement. It took some time before the general
term ‘advertisement’ was settled upon, with alternatives like ‘puffs’, ‘bubbles’,
even ‘impertinences’, in circulation until well into the nineteenth century. Yet
despite its antiquity, ‘quaint device’ is a perfectly apposite description and one
that offers a subtle hint about the character of early advertising. In contempo-
rary use the term ‘device’ connotes a deliberate, functional mechanism; in the
seventeenth century, it carried stronger connotations of techniques of con-
trivance, manipulation and deception. Both these senses can be applied to
contemporary advertising, but they are equally descriptive of early advertising
and it is entirely likely that the writer in the Mercurius Mastix had the latter
sense in mind. This is a clue that something might be amiss in the received char-
acterisation of early advertising as an innocuous and naïve first foray into the
realm of commercial promotion. Pre-twentieth-century advertising is almost
universally portrayed as simple announcement, to be contrasted with the cun-
ning sophistication and subtlety of contemporary versions (Williams, 1980;
Dyer, 1982; Leiss et al., 1986). One of the first insights offered by historical
research is that such judgements are generally made from the distance of time;
they seldom, if ever, refer to advertising of the ‘present day’.
A second and instructive sense of the term ‘device’ can be found in
Callon’s anthropologically informed work on markets (Callon, 1998a,
1998b; Callon et al., 2002). Callon revisits the debate between those who
would have economies and markets as real, objectively existing entities, and
those who would have them as pure ‘fiction’ or social construction. His dis-
tinctive formulation is that neither is the case. Instead economies and mar-
kets are the simultaneous outcome of the work of many different forms of
calculative agencies, and the material devices employed therein. Economics,
and related disciplines of management, marketing and sociology, work to

1
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 2

‘perform’ the economy and organise markets by evolving the techniques,

advertising

tools and devices that define and measure what is meant by ‘economy’.
Advertising can be characterised as a material device employed in the defin-
ition or qualification of markets, and this is a role that merits much closer
investigation than it has yet received (see Callon et al., 2002; Slater, 2002a).
As a calculative institution, advertising originates in a very specific commer-
cial impulse to promote sales. This foundational objective may have
remained consistent over the years but the nature of the techniques, tools
and devices deployed to meet it have varied enormously. The precise cir-
cumstances underlying these variations and, in particular, the ways advertising
has been indelibly shaped by the interaction of institutional, organisational
and technological arrangements, is a fascinating field of critical inquiry, but
one that has thus far been left largely untouched by an academy that has
preferred a different approach.
This approach has grown out of an enduring fascination not with
advertising but with advertisements. Advertisements seem to offer an insight
into what one nineteenth-century author described as ‘the wants, the losses,
the amusements and the money-making eagerness of the people’ (Anon.,
1855: 183). Journalists, historians and social and cultural theorists concur –
advertisements mirror dominant values, attitudes and habits and are thus
prime source material for divining the ‘spirit’ or ‘pattern’ of the age (Salmon,
1923; Hower, 1939; Wood, 1958; Rowsome, 1959). This view of advertise-
ments as socio-cultural source material structures critical academic work
conducted principally, but not exclusively, within the disciplinary bound-
aries of sociology and cultural and media studies. The resulting characteri-
sation of the socio-cultural and economic significance of advertising, and its
empirical basis, is the central problem that this book addresses.
This will involve, in the first part of the book (Chapters 1–4), a close
interrogation of the approach taken to advertising in critical academic work
over the last few decades. Critical fascination with advertisements as source
material is motivated primarily not by what they reveal about advertising,
but by what they reveal about societies, cultures and economies. The acad-
emy, however, has tended towards the view that these insights are not simply
offered up by advertisements, but are to be gained only from specific, technical
methods of analysis. Advertisements may be society’s mirror but, as Marchand
(1985: xvii) insists, it is an odd sort of mirror – a ‘Zerrspiegel’ that both
selects from and distorts the reality depicted. The true significance of adver-
tising texts has to be ‘decoded’, and an extensive corpus of work has been
devoted to the development of methodologies – like content analysis and
semiotics – tuned to this task. Such methodologies are generally deployed to
help provide grand explanations of how advertising goes beyond the stimula-
tion of demand for specific products to ‘produce’ consumption as a specific
mode of behaviour. At a fundamental level, critical academic work has

2
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 3

bought into Galbraith’s characterisation of advertisements as producing the

introduction
sorts of consumer required by specific industrial systems (Galbraith, 1958).
This textually fixated approach to advertising has incurred certain
costs. Foremost among these has been a sustained neglect, over the last 30
years or so, of production-side analyses of the institutions and practices of
advertising. This is a particular instance of what has been considered a
broader disdain of the market and the economic as proper objects of analy-
sis within disciplines like sociology and cultural and media studies (Morris,
1988; Zelizer 1988). Such a disdain is in evidence in works that have
achieved a near canonical status, but whose expositions of advertising’s
cultural and economic significance are extrapolated almost exclusively from
analyses of individual advertising texts (Barthes 1977; Williamson, 1978;
Wernick, 1991; Goldman, 1992; Goldman & Papson, 1996). The index entry
for advertising in Goldman and Papson’s Sign Wars, for instance, includes
sub-entries like ‘harvesting’, ‘semiotic obsolescence’ and ‘sign economy’, but
not ‘agency’ or ‘practitioner’. Even works adopting a broader perspective
tend to be conducted at a remove from the minutiae of everyday practice
(Ewen, 1976; Schudson, 1984; Leiss et al., 1986; Mattelart, 1991; Fowles,
1996). By the middle of the 1990s, almost no detailed empirical study of the
character or development of contemporary advertising practice existed. For
an institution that plays a pivotal role in the grand narratives of economy, culture
and society offered by Frankfurt-variant political economy (Horkheimer &
Adorno, 1973; Haug, 1986), mainstream liberal economic theory (Galbraith,
1958), as well as a plethora of more recent accounts of the epoch (Jameson,
1984; Baudrillard, 1988a; Featherstone, 1991; Lash & Urry, 1994; Bauman,
2000, 2001), this is a particularly poor state of affairs, and one that is only
slowly beginning to change.2 Disregarding the practices and institutions of
advertising is especially unhelpful when the object of critique, despite being
derived from the evidence of advertisements, is advertising as a societal insti-
tution. This should raise eyebrows: Is it really adequate to found a critique
that reaches far into the nature and organisation of contemporary societies
upon textual deconstruction of the meanings of advertisements?
A preoccupation with texts, moreover, is not the only problem with
advertising critique. In a move that springs directly from the treatment of adver-
tising as a window onto the grand problematics of social, cultural and eco-
nomic organisation, critical accounts have accorded advertising a very
particular historical role. Advertising is conceived of as an institution that is
steadily evolving in power and sophistication. As mentioned at the outset,
early advertisements are generally characterised as simple, crude and naïve –
the inevitable corollary of this is the view that contemporary advertisements
are persuasive, subtle and intelligent. This is complemented by a perception
that while contemporary advertisements are pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable,
earlier advertisements were rare and unusual. These characteristics are ascribed

3
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 4

to much larger processes of transformation in which the integrity of culture,

advertising

and in particular its autonomy from economy, is often thought to be at stake

in a process sometimes referred to as culturalisation or hybridisation
(Jameson, 1984; Featherstone, 1991; Wernick, 1991; Lash & Urry, 1994;
Sternberg, 1999). If contemporary advertising is a persuasive, pervasive and
hybrid form it is because the logic underlying societies defined epochally as
commodity- or consumer-driven requires it to be so.
It is not really possible in this space to do justice to the many competing
formulations of the contemporary epoch, and in the effort to tease out the func-
tional role of advertising within them some important distinctions will no doubt
be collapsed. Nonetheless it is fairly uncontroversial to note that both
consumer- and commodity-driven designations of the epoch turn on a particu-
lar account of contemporary consumption (Jameson, 1984; Baudrillard, 1988a;
Featherstone, 1991; Lash & Urry, 1994; Bauman, 2000, 2001). Exponential
increases in the volume of consumption over the last half century are clearly of
some consequence here, but the caesural distinction is not so much the quantity
as the character of consumption. At stake, for many theorists, is a progressive
decline in the importance of instrumental, utility-driven consumption, and a
concomitant expansion in symbolic consumption (Campbell, 1987; Baudrillard,
1988a; Ferguson, 1992; Bauman, 2001). Contemporary consumption is all
about the desire for difference and the expression of identity through the dis-
play of sign values. Advertising is thoroughly implicated in this shift and, by
extension, in an array of related changes. The manner in which it seeks to pro-
mote consumption leaves advertising up to its neck in what Baudrillard (1988b)
calls the symbolic exchange of sign values, and the consequences of this are
hard to overstate. Advertising plays around with meanings drawn from a pre-
existing culture to make objects seem more significant, more desirable and more
personal than they really are. In the process a sort of reconfiguration of other-
wise more stable relations occurs between meaning and reality, subjects and
objects, and culture and economy. Advertising is thus cast in a transformative
historical role, where its evolutionary advances are tuned to the changing struc-
tures and organisation of the epoch.
This teleological characterisation is, intuitively, entirely reasonable.
Technology has enhanced advertisements with colour, sound and movement
in a way unthinkable even 50 years ago, while profiling and niche market-
ing techniques enable specific groups to be targeted on the basis of ever more
finely tuned criteria. The problem, however, is that manifest changes in the
form and appearance of advertisements, in themselves, are not sufficient
evidence on which to pin such a vast historical transformation. An under-
standing of advertising’s historical significance really has to encompass more
than the deconstructive analysis of texts, no matter how skilful the exposition
might be. For this reason the second part of the book (Chapters 5–6) seeks to
reappraise advertising through the mechanism of a historically situated focus

4
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 5

on the context of advertising production. Despite the importance accorded to

introduction
advertising’s transformative historical role in several branches of critical
theory, the empirical history of advertising production has actually been much
neglected. The preoccupation with interpreting changes in advertising format
has tended to override the need to investigate the specification, formation and
operation of advertising practices at a local, organisational level. This is much
to be regretted, because the context in which material practices were con-
ducted is crucial to understanding the format of advertisements and the
broader role of advertising. It is a central contention here that the critical
characterisation of contemporary advertising as an increasingly persuasive
and pervasive transformational medium cannot be sustained in the absence of
any detailed historical evidence. Such evidence is of limited use unless it is sen-
sitive to the historical context of production – little can be surmised by com-
paring the advertisements of different historical periods without any regard to
the circumstances in which they were produced. The book aims to reconstruct
something of these production circumstances through a description of the
institutions, practices and products of advertising prevalent in both the UK
and the US in the period between 1780 and 1935.
This is not an attempt at a comprehensive history. Instead, the book
offers a snapshot of how advertising operated as a way of generating dif-
ferent ways of thinking about its contemporary and historical formations.
This approach is informed by Foucault’s genealogical model of ‘the acci-
dents, the minute deviations – or conversely the complete reversals – the
errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations’ that comprise history
(Foucault, 1984b: 81). Genealogy endorses a history of advertising tuned,
not to a predetermined evolution, but to how a diverse, haphazard and
uneven array of institutions, practices and products adapted to fit specific
contextual circumstances at different historical moments. The adoption of
this approach is underscored by the conviction that, in providing a little
more context, historical description offers a salient response to critical con-
cerns about the increasing persuasiveness, pervasiveness and hybridisation of
contemporary advertising. This is not a form of revisionism seeking to por-
tray historical advertising as equally or more persuasive, pervasive or
hybridised, but employs instead a different logic. This is a logic which insists
that, outside the historical context of production, criteria like persuasiveness
have little meaning. Their purchase is always and only in relation to an avail-
able external context upon which they are entirely contingent. Thus, the
existence of persuasive twenty-first century television advertising cannot be
thought to preclude the existence of persuasive nineteenth-century press
advertisements, anymore than fast contemporary transport links preclude
the fact that rail transport was experienced as fast in the nineteenth century.
The concept of contingency runs through the second part of the book as a constant
reminder that the features applied to distinguish contemporary advertising

5
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 6

are not absolute, and are much tougher to measure across the distance of
advertising

time than is often recognised in critical theory.

structure and organisation This book is intended as a

response to critical characterisations of advertising’s role in sustaining soci-
eties driven by the logic of ‘commodity consumption’. Such characterisations
emanate from a range of critical traditions, employ different methodologies,
and arrive at distinctive theoretical positions. Accordingly, the first part of
the book (Chapters 1–4), comprises a close review of the literature, estab-
lishing the recurrence of certain themes and theoretical conventions that
have dominated thinking, to the point where a historically situated, practice-
based methodology offers a much needed alternative perspective. Such a
methodology forms the core of Chapters 5 and 6, which focus on describing
how the diversity of forms taken over time by the institutions, practices
and products of advertising challenges their teleological characterisation in
critical work.
Chapter 1 begins with a review of the defining importance of semiotic
theory and method in the critical study of advertising. Semiotics describes
how advertisements manipulate the relation between ‘meaning’ and ‘reality’
by appropriating pre-existing meanings to add value to unrelated products,
and posits methods of decoding their true underlying significance. Having
outlined this approach in some detail, Chapter 1 goes on to suggest that the
semiotic pursuit of ‘authentic’ meaning is rendered problematic by recent
work, foregrounding the contingency of meaning upon instances of use. This
analysis is taken forward in Chapter 2 with a review of critical accounts that
have adopted a broader institutional perspective on advertising. This ‘insti-
tutionally focused’ body of work is concerned less with the relationship
between meaning and reality and more with that between subjects and
objects. In particular, this literature addresses advertising’s role in trans-
forming the latter relationship in line with the changing requirements of
consumer- or commodity-based societies through the production of ever more
persuasive and pervasive advertisements. Empirical evidence in support of
such claims, Chapter 2 goes on to argue, is surprisingly sparse, and rather at
odds with emerging historical accounts of early consumption and promotion
practices. Chapter 3 continues to work with this literature and incorporates
emerging work on advertising practices in a shift of emphasis from subjects
and objects to the ‘domains’ of culture and economy. Advertising’s capacity
to bridge and thereby transform the relation between economy and culture
is a recurrent critical theme. This formulation deploys ‘culture’ and ‘economy’
as separate and opposed ‘domains’ that would function autonomously, were
it not for the intervention of commodity systems of production that work to

6
Introduction.qxd 1/13/04 10:52 AM Page 7

effect a ‘de-differentiation’ or ‘hybridisation’ of the domains. Chapter 3

introduction
posits as an alternative, a formulation of the ‘cultural’ and the ‘economic’ as
provisional conceptual abstractions whose separation, however convenient
intellectually, collapses in instances of material practice. Advertising might
be more accurately conceived of as a constituent material practice in which
the ‘cultural’ and the ‘economic’ are inextricably entangled. Chapter 4
reviews the foregoing chapters to build the case for a genealogical descrip-
tion of advertising practice as an appropriate response to the abstract
epochalism of critical literature on the subject. It describes a marked ten-
dency to theorise a historical role for advertising that is rarely historically
empiricised, but argues that no matter how convenient the fit may appear,
history does not offer solutions to theoretical problems. What history can do
is provide a more sensitive and informed portrayal of the commercial, promo-
tional environment of the past.
Chapter 6 addresses the characterisation of contemporary advertising
as an exceptionally pervasive and hybrid ‘culture industry’ through an explo-
ration of the institutions and practices of advertising in historical context.
Direct comparisons of the role of advertising at different historical moments,
relative to criteria such as pervasiveness and hybridity, are no simple matter,
because historical comparisons do not compare like with like. Nevertheless,
historical description offers an effective counterbalance to critical caricatures
of early advertising by highlighting the context in which specific institutions,
arrangements and practices prevailed at given historical moments. The chapter
begins with a discussion of the institutional context of relations between
practitioners, agencies, the media and advertisers, and highlights the sheer
diversity and scope of arrangements and actors involved in the early devel-
opment of the field. It then moves on to consider the impact of advertising
on outdoor environments, and reveals an entirely unexpected saturation of
outdoor environments which led one contemporary commentator to
describe advertising as ‘the monster megatherium of modern society’ (Smith,
1853: 278). The next part of the chapter reviews the historical practice
of advertising with the aim of revisiting the argument that a unique de-
differentiation between the cultural and economic is currently underway. The
first problem raised with this view stems from the presence of ‘cultural’ or,
more accurately, ‘aesthetic’ competences among historical practitioners as
far back as the early nineteenth century. The second problem is with the defini-
tion of culture as a separate and bounded ‘sphere’. Chapter 5 shows, through
a close description of the development of the functional specialisms – account
management, media buying and research – that culture is necessarily consti-
tutive of material practice.
Finally, Chapter 7 turns to the persuasiveness of advertisements them-
selves. Curiously, there are remarkably few contemporaneous discussions of
advertising that do not describe the enormous superiority of contemporary

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advertisements over the ‘naïve’ ‘crude’ or ‘quaint’ attempts of earlier generations.

advertising

Chapter 7 suggests that this anomaly arises because persuasiveness is not a

function of the use of particular sorts of images, copy or psychological strate-
gies, but is contingent upon the techniques, technologies and media available
at a given historical moment. The chapter reviews the uses of ‘persuasive’
images, copy and emotional appeals within their contexts of production to
uncover how different institutional, organisational and technical methods, as
well as social, political and economic circumstances indelibly imprint them-
selves upon the forms advertising takes at different historical moments.
The concluding chapter draws together these different themes to reit-
erate the fundamental claim that advertising should not be theorised simply
as the evolving tool of commodity-driven societies, but merits close study as
a specific commercial device. Viewed in this light, the full capacity of adver-
tising to ‘reinvent’ itself in an array of different forms, in response to low-
level changes in the environments in which it is conducted, begins to emerge.

notes
1 Cited in Elliot, 1962: 102.
2 See Moeran (1996), Mort (1996) and Nixon (1996; 2003) for more detailed
research into advertising practice.

8
Ch-01.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page 9

1
colonising of the real

Advertisements do not simply manipulate us, inoculate us or reduce us to the status of objects;
they create structures of meaning which sell commodities not for themselves as useful objects
but in terms of ourselves as social beings in our different social relationships. Products are
given ‘exchange-value’: ads translate statements about objects into statements about types of
consumer and human relationships. (Dyer, 1982: 116)

introduction Semiotic theory and method have been of defining

importance to the development of academic approaches to advertising.1 Pure
applications of semiotic method may be rarer now than in the past, but con-
cepts, ideas and methods deriving from the tradition continually resurface in
theoretical work, and even inform commercial practice.2 For this reason the
aim of this chapter is to look closely at how advertising has been theorised
within the semiotic tradition, in order to establish some of the insights, and
some of the pitfalls, of the approach.
At the centre of the semiotic account of advertising is the relation
between meaning and reality. Semiotics offers both an explanation of the
relationship between meaning and reality and a method of getting at the
meanings of texts. Its success in both these respects is radically dependent
on how categories like meaning and the real are conceptualised. If the
semiotic definition of these categories is accepted, its account of what and
how texts mean is very convincing. Yet semiotics offers only one of a
number of epistemological stances on meaning, not all of which are at all
compatible with the semiotic account. One of the main aims of this chapter
is to review some of these different stances, not in order to arrive at the
best way of thinking about meaning, but rather to make the case for an
approach to the study of advertising less centred upon the problematic of
meaning. The simple reason for this is that while debates about the nature
of meaning provide a fertile and fascinating philosophical challenge, in the

9
Ch-01.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page 10

end they reveal little about advertising. This relates to the overall argument
advertising

of the book that critical debates about advertising are hampered by their
focus on the meaning of texts and products, at the expense of the practices
of the industry.
This chapter begins with a detailed review of semiotic theory and
method. A variety of theorists have contributed to the development of the
structuralist semiotic project originally envisaged by Saussure (1960); but
insofar as the approach has been applied to the study of advertising, Barthes’s
expositions (1973, 1977) are the most interesting and influential. Accordingly,
close attention is paid to how Barthes defined the semiotic project and
the relationship between meaning, reality and society in Myth Today. For
Barthes, semiotics is a science devoted to the problem of meaning, which, in
combination with other sciences, provides a totalist explanation of how
social systems function and are reproduced. This overview of semiotics as
theory is followed by a discussion of semiotics as method, in a review of its
application to the study of advertising by Barthes and by critical theorists
like Williamson (1978), Dyer (1982) and Goldman (1992), among others.
These semiotic analyses of advertising texts share a preoccupation with
the way in which advertising dissolves, captures, abducts, colonises or other-
wise corrupts ‘authentic’ meanings, so that ‘reality’ increasingly disappears
from view.
The validity of semiotic method as a basis for such large, ‘totalist’
claims is considered in a section airing some of the criticisms which have
been levelled at semiotics as a way of getting at meaning. These criticisms
derive, in the first instance, from concerns about the objectivity of semiotics
as an interpretive method, but also from the status of texts as discrete and
competent sources of meaning. Theorists, particularly those working within
or influenced by a loosely defined ‘post-structuralist’ tradition, have argued
that meaning is ‘intertextually’ negotiated across a range of sites, not inher-
ent within texts. These criticisms highlight some of the problems with tex-
tual analysis as a way of getting at meaning, but they also begin to suggest a
deeper problem raised by the pursuit of meaning.
This arises because of the status of meaning as a contested category.
Alternative conceptualisations of meaning uncover both the dependence of
the semiotic account on what can be described as a materialist conception
of meaning, and the availability of alternative approaches to the definition of
meaning. The main goal here is not to ‘re-re-conceptualise’ meaning, but to
describe some of the pitfalls of placing meaning at the centre of critical
accounts of advertising. The pursuit of meaning in literature critical of
advertising is a potentially limitless task which, whatever it may yield
in philosophical terms, explains very little about the commercial practice
of advertising.

10
Ch-01.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page 11

the semiotic project

one
Semiotics as science This section sets out the main characteristics of the

• colonising of the real

semiotic explanation. Semiotics offers not only a method but a compre-
hensive social critique – what Barthes, with Marx in his sights, calls a
totalist explanation of social life. Barthes’s vision of semiotics is quite in
keeping with Marx’s ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’, which
accounts for any phenomena in terms of the determinative action of the
mode of production (Marx, 1844: 12). The goal is to outline the ways in
which Barthes understood the links between semiotics as a formal method
and the overall operation and reproduction of the social system. The key
to this is in the status of semiotics as a ‘vast science of signs’ applied to ‘the
problem of meaning’ (Barthes, 1973: 119). The operation of meaning is of
concern to Barthes because it is intrinsic to the functioning of all aspects
of social life. At the most fundamental level Barthes’s method of exploring
meaning depends upon an acceptance of semiotics as a formal science.
What this means is that forms should be studied apart from their content.
The study of forms may be an abstraction, but if so it is justified as a nec-
essary aspect of scientific technique, and because it can provide the best
insight into social life.

Less terrorised by the spectre of ‘formalism’, historical criticism might have been less
sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way
contradict the necessary principle of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a
system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical
criticism. (Barthes 1973: 120)

The sort of formal, historical criticism that Barthes has in mind is based on
the combination of semiology with other sciences. This is to be achieved
through mythology, which deploys semiology, the formal science, in ‘dialec-
tical coordination’ with ideology as ‘historical science’, to yield a totalist
explanation of social life and its structures of order and reproduction
(Barthes, 1973: 121). Barthes’s definition does not stretch beyond describ-
ing ideology as an historical science, but his use is consistent with the
Marxist conception of a tool elaborating the base/superstructure model,
whereby the ‘mode of production of material life conditions the general
character of social, political and intellectual processes of life’ (Marx, 1859:
67). Material production is caught up here in some form or pattern of deter-
mination with the superstructural forms of ideology and culture. At the
risk of doing a disservice to the various Gramscian, Althusserian and

11
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post-Althusserian reformulations of the nature and relative degree of

advertising

ideological autonomy, this is broadly what Barthes has in mind when he

describes ideology as an historical science. Mythology is therefore rooted in
two distinct but coordinated approaches: the specific historical science of
ideology, and the formal science of semiology. An understanding of what
this means in practice requires some detailed unpacking of the methodology
of this formal science.
Semiotics, fundamentally, concerns the study of formal relations
between different elements that are understood to produce meaning. The
most basic element is the sign, which is the ‘associative total’ of two further
elements: the signifier, or material object and the signified, its meaning. In
practice a sign is always object plus meaning, as the separation of signifier
and signified is purely an analytical device. Meaning in signs works at two
levels in the first instance; the first level is denotative, the second, connota-
tive. Denotation refers to literal, ‘objective’ meaning: a rose is a type of
flower. Connotation goes beyond literal meaning and draws upon cultural
codes, while still depending on the denotation: a rose is a flower that signi-
fies love. In this system denotation is the site at which connotations can be
expressed, such that ‘the first system (denotation) becomes the plane of
expression or signifier of the second system (connotation) … the signifiers of
connotation are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the
denoted system’ (Barthes, 1967: 91).
A further relation studied in semiotics is that between signs. Saussure
(1960) originally proposed the distinction between syntagmatic and para-
digmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations refer to the possible ways in
which signs can be combined together in a chain. In verbal language this
is governed by grammatical syntax rules, but other types of language or
code also employ syntagmatic or combinatory rules. Paradigmatic rela-
tions, on the other hand, refers to the association between different signs
that share a function, such that they can appear in the same context
but not at the same time. Barthes’s famous example of these relations used
the fashion code to clarify how syntagmatic relations were those between
different elements of dress which could be worn together – for example,
jeans–shirt–jacket – whilst paradigmatic relations existed between
those elements which could not – for example, hat–veil–hood (Barthes,
1982: 211).
Mythology involves the study of how these relations operate at a more
general, ‘macro’ level. For Barthes, myth is a kind of second-order system,
‘staggered’ in relation to language, the first system. Signs that function as total
units of meaning at the first level are thus reduced to mere signifiers at the
second. Meaning in myth comes from combinations of signs that collectively
express broader, cultural ideas.

12
Ch-01.qxd 1/13/04 10:48 AM Page 13

one
We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself,

• colonising of the real

photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are
reduced to a mere signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. … Whether
it deals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in them only a sum of
signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. (Barthes, 1973: 123)

To clarify this point Barthes uses the example of a Paris-Match cover depicting
a black soldier in French uniform saluting the French flag. Here, meaning is
communicated not through the individual signs in the image but through the
transformation of these individual signs into a single signifier of French
imperiality. The signifier here then is ‘a black soldier is giving the French
salute’ and the signified is ‘a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militari-
ness’ (1973: 125). It is at this level that ideology is in operation, transmitting
specific, semiologically structured historical ideas about the nature of French
society. Mythology thus concerns the distribution of specific ideologies
through the dialectical coordination of historical and formal sciences. This
dual nature underlies Barthes’s account of the relationship between myth
and meaning.
Myth has a peculiar function in relation to meaning. Analogous to the
sign, the signifier of myth has two components: meaning and form. Meaning
here is a full and authentic category made up of the history of the object,
which is emptied or ‘impoverished’ by the form of myth. Historical meaning,
whilst not finally nullified, is kept at a distance, close enough to sustain the
form of myth but far enough to tame and reduce historical meaning. In the
Paris-Match cover, for example, Barthes explains, ‘one must put the biogra-
phy of the Negro in parentheses if one wants to free the picture, and prepare
it to receive its signified’ (1973: 127). In this way historical meaning is trans-
formed, through the formal action of semiology, to a state which will not
threaten existing social and economic interests. Of particular interest for the
purposes of this chapter is the status of meaning as a coherent, univocal
‘truth’ impoverished by myth.
If semiology explains the formal relations of meaning, ideology pro-
vides the connection between myth and what Barthes terms ‘the interests of
a definite society’ (1973: 139). These interests are conceived in Marxist
terms as those of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Through suppressing his-
torical meaning, myth acts in the interests of a definite social order, the cap-
italist system of production, to ‘transform history into nature’.3 Even where
the intention of myth is explicit, it is perceived as natural, ‘not read as a
motive but as a reason’ (1973: 140). This naturalising of specific historical
intentions is how myth operates as bourgeois ideology. For Barthes, as for

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Marx, the world pre-exists language as a set of dialectical relations between

advertising

‘man’ [sic] and nature, but myth acts to transform the historical reality of
these relations into a harmonious façade. Concealed beneath this façade is
the struggle and contest of man’s ‘real’ relation to nature, where nature is
transformed through labour (1973: 155).
In Barthes’s schema myth obscures the dialectical structure of the real
and serves the interests of the bourgeoisie by concealing their existence. The
bourgeoisie are made invisible because myth acts to transform bourgeois
interests into the everyday, the apparently natural order of things, and in this
it is distinct from left-wing myth.

Left-wing myth never reaches the immense field of human relationships, the very vast
surface of ‘insignificant’ ideology. Everyday life is inaccessible to it: in a bourgeois soci-
ety, there are no ‘Left-wing’ myths concerning marriage, cooking, the home, the theatre,
the law, morality etc. Then it is an incidental myth, its use is not part of a strategy, as is
the case with bourgeois myth, but only of a tactic, or, at the worst, of a deviation; if it
occurs, it is as a myth suited to a convenience, not to a necessity. (Barthes, 1973: 161)

There is then a clear structural separation of function and intent between

bourgeois myth and myth on the left. Bourgeois myth has a natural, univer-
sal everyday status, a completeness that refers to all aspects of social order,
rendering it unavoidable and inescapably deterministic. This is what Barthes
is getting at when he labels myth ‘depoliticised speech’: the disappearance of
particular political and economic intentions under a natural, quotidian
appearance. Despite Barthes’s assertion that every myth has its own history
and geography, this account of the progress of myth stresses a linear top-
down dissemination from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture (1973: 163). There are no
competing interests here; there are no fundamental differences between
bourgeois and petit-bourgeois myth, as they all exist in the same ‘natu-
ralised’ relation to history. While there is myth on the left it is not myth
in the proper sense, as it can not disguise specific political intention as
everyday knowledge, and is therefore separate in function and intent from
myth proper.
Semiotics, at least for Barthes, was conceived as part of a much larger
explanation of the operation and reproduction of given societies. As a
method, semiotics is designed around the description and analysis of formal
relations between elements that contribute to the production of meaning, but
instilled within this is the view that the formal operation of meaning is strate-
gically linked to particular historical intentions, in accordance with the inter-
ests of ruling groups. In its coordination with ideology, semiotics achieves

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this by suppressing authentic, historical meanings that derive from the

one
dialectical reality of man’s relation to nature.

• colonising of the real

Crucially, there are two different sorts of meaning operating in the
semiotic account. There is formal meaning, which is communicated through
the relational functionality of the sign, and there is historical meaning, which
is suppressed through the action of the former. In this sense signification is
understood as a sort of artifice on top of the real relations between meaning,
history and nature. This is an interesting proposition, but it begs the ques-
tion of precisely how and when the dialectical structure of reality started to
fade from view. The question of periodisation is not one that Barthes really
addresses; there is simply an assumed, distant past prior to the ‘order’ of cap-
italist societies. Barthes’s semiotics thus evoke the enduring myth of a sim-
pler, purer past where reality was less susceptible to signification. This sort
of position has had an enormous influence on thinking about the role of
advertising in contemporary societies. Advertising more than any other
medium is precisely placed to transform ‘real’ meanings, to make what
Barthes would call specific historical intention appear natural and inevitable.
In the next section attention will shift to exactly how semiotics has been
applied to advertising to make precisely this sort of argument.

the rhetoric of the advertising

image: how it works

Because in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the

signifieds of the advertising image are formed a priori by certain attributes of the prod-
uct and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible. If the image
contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a
view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank or at least emphatic.
(Barthes, 1977: 33)

Barthes’s discussion of the application of semiotic method to advertising

images, the Rhetoric of the Image, was first published in 1964, but it was to
set the tone for much subsequent critical research into advertising for the
next few decades. This section addresses how semiotics, both as a method
and as an explanation, has influenced critical accounts of advertising since
the 1970s. To this end the section will begin with a closer look at Barthes’s
take on the advertising image, before moving on to consider how other
authors have extrapolated on the method. The seminal treatment here is
Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements (1978), and this will feature prominently

15
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alongside the accounts of other writers including Leymore (1975), Goldman

advertising

(1992) and Goldman and Papson (1994; 1996). These accounts interpret
semiotics in distinctive ways and apply varied technical approaches, but they
share some fundamental ideas about the relationship between advertising,
meaning and reality in contemporary societies. Indeed, for a certain period it
became almost impossible to think critically about advertising outside this
framework. Moreover, whilst dissatisfaction with ‘pure’ or rigid applications
of semiotic method have been increasingly expressed by critical writers on
advertising,4 the method continues to inform questions about the meaning of
advertisements raised in a wide range of recent work (Giaccardi, 1995; Cross,
1996; Fowles, 1996; Kang, 1999; Myers, 1999; Cronin, 2000).
In his well-known analysis of an advertisement for Panzani foods
depicting a string bag spilling out its contents of Panzani pastas, parmesan
cheese, tomato sauce and fresh vegetables, Barthes deconstructs three mes-
sages contained within the visual text. The first message Barthes identifies is
the linguistic message. This has denotational and connotational elements,
and two main functions – anchorage and relay. Relay has a narrative func-
tion to carry the story forward, and although crucial in film it is rare in the
fixed image. Anchorage is the most significant function of linguistic text
because it represses the proliferation of multiple and undesirable meanings
and ‘it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above
all invested’ (Barthes, 1977: 40). The second message inherent within the
denoted image is described as ‘a non-coded iconic message’ (1977: 36). At
this level the image appears as a message without a code, its nature is
‘absolutely analogical’, in that the objects presented have an apparently nat-
ural status in the photograph (1977: 42–3). The function of this second mes-
sage, in accordance with the key semiotic principle, is revealed through its
relation to the third, coded iconic message. The non-coded ‘denoted’ image’s
special function is to naturalise the coded, ‘symbolic’ message. This function
is crucial as the third message operates at the level of connotation, where
‘semantic artifice’ is deeply embedded.
In the coded iconic message there is a series of discontinuous signs.
Barthes isolates at least four signs or cultural connotations provoked by
the Panzani advert: a return from the market, Italianicity, a total culinary
service and the ‘still life’. Barthes suggests that there is a further information
pointer that reveals that the image is an advertisement. This arises from the
place of the image in the magazine and from the emphasis on labels. In a
move consistent with semiotics’ reification of the text, Barthes reaches the
obscure conclusion that this information eludes signification, as the adver-
tising nature of the image is purely functional. The external system of which
advertising is a part is thereby ruled outside the construction of meaning.
This is not to imply that semiotics offers an account of meaning as self-
evident or inherent within texts in an unproblematic way. Rather, semiotics

16
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 "Humph!" said the spokesman, inspecting me from crown to
toe. "Where do you hail from?"
Before I could reply there swarmed down the companionway a
host of cabin passengers, in port-of-call array, whom the Englishman
greeted with bared head and his broadest welcome-to-our-city
smile; then bowed to the launch ladder. As he resumed his chair I
laid my passport before him.
"For what purpose do you desire to land in Gibraltar?" he
demanded.
"I am bound for Spain--" I began.
"Spain!" shouted the Briton, with such emphasis as if that land
lay at the far ends of the earth. "Indeed! Where are you going from
Gibraltar, and how soon?"
"Until I get ashore I can hardly say; in a day or so, at least; to
Granada, perhaps, or Málaga."
"Out of respect for the American passport," replied the
Englishman grandiloquently, "I am going to let you land. But see you
stick to this story."
I descended to the launch and ten minutes later landed with my
haughty fellow-tourists at a bawling, tout-lined wharf. An officer
peeped into my handbag, and I sauntered on through a fortress gate
under which a sun-scorched Tommy Atkins marched unremittingly to
and fro. Beyond, opened a narrow street, paralleling the harbor front
and peopled even at this early hour with a mingling of races that
gave to the scene the aspect of a temperate India, or a scoured and
rebuilt Egypt. Sturdy British troopers in snug khaki and roof-like
tropical helmets strode past; bare-legged Moors in flowing bournous
stalked by in the widening streak of sunshine along the western
walls; the tinkle of goat-bells mingled with the rhythmic cries of their
drivers, offering a cup fresh-drawn to whomever possessed a
copper; now an orange woman hobbled by, chanting her wares;
everywhere flitted swarthy little men in misfit rags, with small
baskets of immense strawberries which sold for a song to all but the
tourists who tailed out behind me.
Suddenly, a furlong beyond the gate, a signboard flashed down
upon me, and I turned instinctively in at the open door of the
"Seaman's Institute." I found myself in a sort of restaurant, with
here and there a pair of England's soldiers at table, and a towsled
youth of darker tint hanging over the bar. I commanded ham and
eggs; when they were served the youth dropped into the chair
opposite and, leaning on his elbows, smiled speechlessly upon me,
as if the sight of an unfamiliar face brought him extraordinary
pleasure.
"Room to put me up?" I asked.
"Nothin' much else but room," sighed the youth, in the slurring
speech of the Anglo-Spanish half-cast, "but the super 's not up yet,
an' I 'm only the skittles."
I left my baggage in his keeping and, roaming on through the
rapidly warming city to the Alameda Gardens, clambered away the
day on the blistered face of the great Rock above.
The "super," a flabby-muscled tank of an Englishman, was
lolling out the evening among his clients when I reëntered the
Institute. My request for lodging roused him but momentarily from
his lethargy.
"Sign off here?" he drawled.
 "Left the Prinzessin this morning," I answered, suddenly
reminded that I was no longer a seaman prepared to produce my
discharge-book on demand.
"A.B., eh?"
"Been before the mast on the Warwickshire, Glen--"
"All right. A bob a night is our tax. But no smoking aloft," he
added, as I dropped a coin on the table before him.
"'Ow ye like Gib?" asked the half-cast, leading the way up a
narrow stairway.
"Like it," I replied.
"Yes, they all does," he mourned, "for one day. But 'ow if you
'ad always to bask on the stewin' old Rock, like a bally lizard? Saint
Patrick! If only some toff 'ud pay me a ticket to America!"
He entered a great room, divided by thin wooden partitions into
a score of small ones, and, tramping down a hallway, lighted me into
the last chamber. Opposite the cot was a tall window with heavy
wooden blinds. I flung them open and leaned out over the reja; and
all at once, unheralded, the Spain of my dreams leaped into reality.
Below, to one side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's main
thoroughfare; further away the flat-roofed city descended in moonlit
indistinctness into the Mediterranean. From a high-walled garden a
pebble-toss away and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees, rose the
twang of a guitar and a man's clear voice singing a languorous air of
Andalusia. Now and again a peal of laughter broke on the night and
drifted away on the wings of the indolent sea-breeze. I rolled a
cigarette and lighted it pensively, not in contempt for the "super's"
orders, but because some transgression of established law seemed
the only fitting celebration of the untrammeled summer that was
opening before me.

CHAPTER II
FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA

Gibraltar rises early. Proof of the assertion may be lacking, but

certainly not even a "Rock lizard" could recompose himself for
another nap after the passing of the crashing military band that
snatched me at daybreak back to the waking world. With one bound
I sprang from cot to window. But there was no ground for alarm; in
gorge-like Waterport street below, Thomas Atkins, a regiment
strong, was marching briskly barrackward, sweeping the flotsam of
civilian life into the nooks and crannies of the flanking buildings.
According to the Hoyle of travelers a glimpse of Morocco was
next in order. But with the absurdity of things inanimate and Oriental
both the Tangiers steamers were scheduled to loll out the day in
harbor. When "Skittles" had again stowed away my chattels, I drifted
aimlessly out into the city. But the old eagerness to tread Spanish
soil was soon upon me, heightened now by the sight of Algeciras
gleaming across the bay. The harbor steamer would have landed me
there a mere peseta poorer. Instead, I sauntered through the
Landport gate and away along the shifting highway which the Holder
of the Rock has dubbed, in his insular tongue, the "Road to Spain."
It led me past the double rank of sentry boxes between which
soldiers of England tramp everlastingly, and into bandit-famed La
Linea. A Spaniard in rumpled uniform scowled out upon me from the
first stone hovel, but, finding me empty-handed, as silently
withdrew. I turned westward through the disjointed town and out
upon the curving shore of the bay.
Here was neither highway nor path. Indeed, were each Spanish
minute tagged with a Broadway price-mark, the peseta would have
been dearly saved, for the apparent proximity of Algeciras had been
but a tricking of the eye. Hour after hour I waded on through
seashore sand, halting now and then in the shadow of some time-
gnawed watch-tower of the departed Moor, before me such a survey
of the shimmering sea to the very base of the hazy African coast as
amply to justify the setting of an outlook on this jutting headland.
The modern guardian of the coast dwells more lowly. Every here
and there I came upon a bleached and tattered grass hut just out of
reach of the languid surf, and under it a no less ragged and listless
carabinero squatted in Arabic pose and tranquillity, musket within
reach, or frankly and audibly asleep on his back in the sand. Yet his
station, too, was wisely chosen. The watch and ward of to-day is set
for no war-trimmed galley from the rival continent, but against petty
smugglers skulking along the rim of the bay. Nor could the guard
better spend his day than asleep: his work falls at night.
It was the hour of siesta when I shuffled up a sandy bank into
Algeciras. Except for a cur or two that slunk with wilted tail across
the plaza, the town lay in sultry repose. I sat down in a shaded
corner of the square. Above me nodded the aged city tower, housing
the far-famed and often-cursed bell of Algeciras. Recently, which is
to say some time during the past century, it was cracked from rim to
crown; and the city fathers have not yet taken up the question of its
replacement. Meanwhile, it continues afflictingly faithful to its task.
At quarter-hourly intervals it clanked out across the bay like the
suspended hull of a battleship beaten with the butt of a cannon, a
languid sigh rose over the drowsing city, and silence settled down
anew.
As the shadows spread, life revived, slowly and yawningly at
first, then swelling to a contrasting merry-making that reached its
climax toward midnight in the festooned streets beyond the plaza.
Algeciras was celebrating her annual feria. Somewhere I fell in with
a carpenter in blouse and hemp sandals, whose Spanish flowed
musically as a woodland brook, and together we sauntered out the
evening among the lighted booths. The amusement mongers were
toiling lustily. Gypsy and clown, bolerina, juggler, and ballad-singer
drew each his little knot of idlers, but a multitude was massed only
around the gambling tables. Here a hubbub of excited voices
assailed the ear; an incessant rain of coins fell on the green cloth,
from the ragged and the tailored, from quavering crones and little
children. The carpenter dived into the fray with his only peseta,
screaming with excitement as the wheel stopped on the number he
had played. Within an hour a pocket of his blouse was bulging with
silver. I caught him by the sleeve and shouted a word in his ear. Wild
horses could not have dragged him away, nor the voices of sirens
have distracted his eyes from the spinning trundle. A half-hour later
he did not possess a copper.
"If you had listened," I said, when we had reached a
conversational distance, "you would not have lost your fortune."
"What fortune!" he panted. "All I have lost, señor, is one peseta,
and had an evening of a lifetime."
 I caught the morning steamer to Gibraltar and an hour later was
pitching across the neck of the Mediterranean on board the Gebel
Dersa. Third-class fare to Africa was one peseta; first-class, ten; and
the difference in accommodation about forty feet,--to wit, the
distance from the forward to the afterdeck. One peseta, indeed,
seemed to be the fixed charge for any service in this corner of the
world. My evening meal, the night's lodging, the boatman's fee for
setting me aboard the steamer had each cost as much. It would be
as easy to quote a fixed selling-price for mining-stocks as to set the
value of that delusive Spanish coin. The summer's average, however,
was close upon sixteen cents for the peseta, of which the céntimo is
the hundredth part. There are at large, be it further noted, a vast
number of home-made pesetas worth just sixteen cents less, which
show great affinity for the stranger's pocket until such time as he
learns to emulate the native and sound each coin on the stone set
into every counter.
It was while we were skirting the calcined town of Tarifa that I
made the acquaintance of Aghmed Shat. The introduction was not of
my seeking--but of the ingratiating ways of Aghmed I need say
nothing, known as he is by every resident of our land. At least I can
recall no fellow-countryman whose visiting-card he did not dig up
from the abysmal confusion of his inner garments.
To that host of admirers it will bring grief to learn that Aghmed
was most unjustly treated aboard the Gebel Dersa on that blistering
thirteenth day of June. Yet facts must be reported. It chanced that
the dozen Anglo-Saxons sprawled ungracefully about the after-deck
composed, at such times as composure was possible, a single party.
As all the world knows, it is for no other purpose than to offer the
protection of his name and learning to just such defenseless flocks
that the high-born Moroccan gentleman in question has been
journeying thrice weekly to the Rock these thirty years. Yet the
bellwether of the party, blind to his opportunity, had chosen as guide
an ignorant, vile, ugly, utterly unprincipled rascal whose only motive
was mercenary. True, Aghmed and the rascal were outwardly as
alike as two bogus pesetas. But surely any man worthy the title of
personal conductor should be versed in the reading of character, or
at least able to distinguish between genuine testimonials from the
world's élite and a parcel of bald forgeries! Worst of all, the leader,
with that stiff-neckedness congenital to his race, had persisted in his
error even after Aghmed had recounted in full detail the rascal's
crimes. Small wonder there was dejection in the face of the
universally-recommended as he crossed the pitching plank that
connected the first-class with the baser world, his skirts threshing in
the wind, his turban awry.
At sight of me, however, he brightened visibly. With
outstretched hand and a wan smile he minuetted forward and
seated himself on the hatch beside me with the unobtrusive
greeting:
"Why for you travel third-class?"
The question struck me as superfluous. But it is as impossible to
scowl down Aghmed's spirit of investigation as to stare him into
believing an American a Spaniard. By the time the valleys of the
African coast had begun to take on individuality, I had heard not
only the full story of his benevolent life but had refused for the
twentieth time his disinterested offer of protection. Nature, however,
made Aghmed a guardian of his fellow-man, as she has made other
hapless mortals poets; and her commands must be carried out at
whatever sacrifice. Gradually, slowly, sadly, the "souvenir" which
"americano gentlemen" were accustomed to bestow upon him with
their farewell hand-clasp fell from twenty shillings to ten, to five, to
three, then to as many pesetas. It was useless to explain that I had
trusted to my own guidance in many an Arab land, and been fully
satisfied with the service. When every other argument had fallen
lifeless at his slippered feet, he sent forth at regular intervals the
sole survivor, cheering it on with a cloud of acrid cigarette smoke:
"Si el señor"--for his hamstrung English had not far endured the
journey--"if the gentleman has never taken a guide, this will be a
new experience."
In the end the sole survivor won. What, after all, is travel but a
seeking after new experience? Here, in truth, was one; and I might
find out for myself whether a full-grown man tagging through the
streets of a foreign city on the heels of a twaddle-spouting native
feels as ridiculous as he looks.
We anchored toward noon in the churning harbor of Tangiers
and were soon pitched into the pandemonium of all that goes to
make up an Oriental mob lying in wait for touring Europeans. In a
twinkling, Aghmed had engaged donkeys to carry us to the principal
hotel. I paused on the outskirts of the riot to inform him that our
sight-seeing would be afoot; and with a scream of astonishment he
reeled and would, perhaps, have fallen had not the street been
paved in that which would have made such stage-business
unpleasant.
"Pero, señor!" he gasped. "You do not--you--why, people will
say you have no money!"
 "Horrible!" I cried, dodging a slaughtered sheep on the head of
a black urchin in scanty night-shirt that dashed suddenly out of a slit
between two buildings. Aghmed, myopic with excitement, failed to
side-step, and it was some distance beyond that his wail again fell
on my ear:
"O señor! Americano gentlemen never go by this street. I
cannot guide without donkeys--"
"You can perhaps run along home to dinner?" I suggested; but
he merely fell silent and pattered on at my heels, now and again
heaving a plaintive sigh.
For the better part of the day we roamed in and out through the
tangled city. In the confusion of donkeys, bare legs, and immodesty,
the narcotic smell of hashish, the sound of the harsh guttural tongue
once so familiar, memories of more distant Mohammedan lands
surged upon me. Yet by comparison Tangiers seemed only a faded
segment of the swarming Arab world set aside to overawe European
tourists, Arabic enough in its way, but only a little, mild-mannered
sample.
Late in the afternoon I rounded the beach and, falling upon the
highway to Fez, strolled away out of sight and sound of the seaport.
Aghmed still languished at my heels. To him also the day had
brought a new experience. As we leaned back against a grassy slope
to watch the setting of the red sun, he broke a long hour's silence.
"Señor," he said, "never have I walked so much. When we had
come to the Socco I was tired. When we had seen all the city my
legs were as two stone pillars. Yet I must keep walking."
"Why?" I asked.
 "Because you must be protected! Ah, señor, you do not know
how dangerous is Tangiers; and here in the country alone you would
before now be dead, or carried off by bandits. Perhaps this much
walking will make me sick. Or if I have been seen by my friends or a
gentleman tourist! Allah meskeen! They will say I am no longer a
gentleman guide, but a donkey boy."
When her night traffic had taken on its wonted swing, my
stone-legged protector called at the inn for the purpose of proving
that the far-famed naughtiness of his city was no mere conceit. The
demonstration was not convincing. Two hours or more we ambled
from wineshop to café cantante, enduring a deal of caterwauling and
inane vulgarity by no means superior to a Friday-night performance
on the Bowery. The relieving shepherd's crook, moreover, being
nowhere in evidence, I fled the torture and retired to bed.
To my infinite relief, Aghmed was on hand in full health next
morning to bid me farewell at the end of the pier and to receive his
specified "souvenir." He was profuse, too, with the hope that I might
soon revisit his land; but I caught no hint of a desire to add my card
to his collection.
The steamer plowed her way back to Europe, and by mid-
afternoon I emerged from the Sailor's Institute face to face with a
serious problem. The most patient of men, which I am not, would
hardly set off on a tramp across the Iberian peninsula carrying a
forty-pound suitcase, even of unread classics. To have dumped the
books in the first alleyway would have been easy, yet painful, for
there runs a strain of Scotch in my veins. I dropped in on the
nearest bookseller to inquire whether he could see his way clear to
accept at a bargain a batch of novels newly imported from New
York. But the eager glow quickly faded from his features as I laid the
volumes before him.
"Why, sir!" he cried. "These be old books, out of date. I thought
had you something New York is reading this summer--"
In which attitude his two rivals also dismissed me, even though
I sought the good will of the last by squandering the bulk of a bright
gold sovereign for Baedeker's "Spain." As I turned down to the
harbor, a thought, or more exactly the sight of a sergeant's uniform
under the fortress gate, struck me. The wearer stiffened like a
ramrod when I halted before him.
"Have you a library in the barracks?"
"Ah--certainly, garrison library. But I hardly fawncy the
commander would allow--"
"Of course not," I interrupted, tossing the books into his arms;
"but I am off for Spain and if you have any use for a few novels--"
"Ah--er--well, thank you most kindly, sir!" bawled the officer
after me.
Though the fact may never be called to his attention, the
sergeant had heard the last phrase of English that passed my lips in
many a week. As a personal experiment I had resolved not to speak
a word of my native tongue within the kingdom of Spain, even to
myself; though this latter proviso, to be sure, necessitated the early
acquisition of a few Spanish terms of double voltage.
The forerunner of evening was descending upon Algeciras as I
mounted through her now all but voiceless fiesta and struck away
over a grass-patched hillock. The further slope was skirted by a
dusty highway that wound off through a billowy country pregnant
with the promise of greater heights to come. But the trend of the
road was west rather than north. Over the hills ahead two male
voices were bawling a sort of dialogue of song. I mended my pace
and had soon overtaken two peasants rollicking homeward from the
festival. When I inquired if this were the highway to Madrid they fell
suddenly silent, after a word of greeting, and strode along beside
me exchanging puzzled glances.
"Well, then, to Honda, señores?" I asked. "Poresta carretera?"
"No, no, señor!" they answered quickly. "Por aquí no! You must
go on the railroad."
"No, I am traveling on foot."
"Perfectamente, señor; and to walk to Honda you must take the
railroad."
There was nothing in the mien of either to suggest the practical
joker. Yet so far as my experience carried there was not a corner of
Europe where two steps on the right of way was rated less a crime
than arson or housebreaking.
We reached the line not far beyond, the highway diving under
by a stone-faced cutting and bearing the peasants away with it. Over
the next rise their dove-tailed duet rang out again and, melting in
volume and rendered almost musical by distance, filtered back to me
from the deepening valleys a full quarter-hour longer.
I climbed the embankment not without misgiving. Sure enough,
a track there was, beside the broad-gauge rails, covered with cinders
and scarred with many imprints of donkey hoofs. A mile along it
demonstrated how poor a walking kit is even a half-empty suitcase. I
sat down to take stock of the contents. In the jumble was a blue
flannel shirt past its prime. I fished out thread and needle and
sewed a Jack-Tar seam across the garment below the armpits,
amputated sleeves and shoulders with a few, slashes, and behold! a
knapsack that might bear my burdens through all the kingdom of
Spain, and hold its own in any gathering of shoulder-packed
wayfarers. When I had stuffed my possessions into it there was still
room to spare for such odds and ends as find their way into the
baggage of the least acquisitive of travelers. Then pitching the
suitcase spread-eagle over the bordering hedge, I cut a stick in a
neighboring thicket and struck off again at the regular stride so
indispensable to any true enjoyment of tramping.
Night fell soon after. A fall it was indeed; no half-hearted settling
down of gloom as in our northern zone, but a descendant flood of
obscurity that left the eyes blinking in dismay. To right and left,
where had been rolling uplands and heathered fields sharp-cut in
smallest detail, nothing--a sea of inky blackness; and ahead, the
stony-blind unknown. The cinder path held firm, but only a foot
rubbing along the rail guided my steps, until such time as sight
resumed its leadership.
An hour or more I marched on into the summer night. Then out
of the darkness ahead stole a feeble point of light, an increasing
murmur of human voices, and the end of the first day's tramp was
before me. Beside the way a stone building stood open, an oil torch
twilighting a cobble-floored room heaped at one end with a Spanish
grocer's wares. An unshaven man of fifty, a red handkerchief bound
brigand-fashion about his head, bulked forward through an inner
doorway.
"You furnish lodgings?"
"Sí, señor; and your burro?"
"I am walking. Is supper to be had?"
 "Claro, hombre! Choose from the baskets and the señora shall
cook it for you in a twinkling."
All through the following day the path continued parasitic to the
railway. The roadbed was thickly covered with crushed stone, with
nowhere a hint of the existence of section-gangs. On either hand
rolled away a landscape stamped with the features of an African
ancestry, all but concealed at times by the cactus-trees of a willow's
height that hedged the track. At rare intervals a stuccoed station
serving some hamlet hidden among the hills found standing-room on
the right of way. An occasional hovel built of field stones frowned
down from the crest of a parched hillock. Now and again out of the
meeting-place of the rails ahead came jogging a peasant seated
sidewise on an ass, to swerve suddenly aside and rattle off down a
rocky gorge, singing a high-pitched ballad of Arabic cadence. But
these were but bubbles on the surface of a fathomless solitude,
though a solitude brilliant with an all-invading sunshine that left no
skulking-place for somber moods.
It turned out that the railroad had not been built for the
exclusive convenience of pedestrians and donkeys. A bit before noon
a rumbling arose out of the north, and no unconscionable time
thereafter the daily "expreso" roared by--at a rate close upon fifteen
miles an hour. The ticket collector, cigarette in mouth, clambered
hand over hand along the running board, in imminent peril of losing
his footing--and being obliged to pursue his train to the next station.
During the afternoon there passed two "mixtos," toy freight trains
with a caudal carload of passengers. But the speed of these was
more reasonable, varying from six to eight miles, with vacations at
each station and frequent holidays in the open country.
 The sun was still an hour high when I reached the station of
San Pablo. This time the town itself stood in plain sight, pitched on
the summit of an oak-grown hill barely a mile from the line. I
plunged quickly down into the intervening valley.
It was a checker-board place, perhaps only a century or two
old; certainly no relic of the Moor, for there was not a sign of shop or
market in all its extent. Only in the last street did I catch sight of one
of its inhabitants, dining in solitary state in the center of a bare
room. He stared at me a long moment when I halted before the
immense open window to inquire for an inn.
"San Pablo, señor," he answered at last, "is a private town
owned by the mining company. There is no inn."
I was turning away when he continued:
"But step inside and we shall see what the ama can arrange for
you."
He was, as I had guessed, a Frenchman, an expert employed in
the mines. The Spanish, however, in which he addressed the ama
was faultless.
"Ah, Don Victor!" protested that matron, "How can I give
posada, having no license from the government? And without the
permission of Don José--"
"Pepete," said the Gaul to an urchin peering in upon us, "ask
Don José to have the goodness to step over. He is manager of the
mines," he continued, "and so alcalde and potentate of San Pablo."
It would have been a misfortune, indeed, to have journeyed
through Andalusia without making the acquaintance of Don José. He
burst in upon us a moment later; a very hippopotamus of a man,
dressed in baggy trousers, slouch hat, and alpaca jacket.
Unfortunately his arrival coincided with my announcement that I was
walking to Córdoba--the whole itinerary would have been too strong
meat for Latin consumption--and his native geniality was for a time
overshadowed by astonishment at my extraordinary means of
locomotion. I had all but finished the meal set for me in an adjoining
room when the pair entered and sat down beside me.
"Señor," began the manager, in what was meant to be a
whisper, "you cannot walk to Córdoba. It is forty leagues."
"How much money have you?" put in the Frenchman.
"Er--I have something over seven pesetas," I answered.
"Bueno! Bonísima!" cried the alcalde, patting me on the
shoulder. "Don Victor and I will add the rest and I shall go with you
to the station to buy the ticket--in the morning."
Great, I reflected, is the infant mortality among generous
resolutions in the gray of dawn, and accordingly held my peace.
Having settled my future to his own satisfaction, Don José
linked an arm in one of mine and plunged out into the night.
"Your bed is waiting for you in your own house," he said with
Spanish formality. "You have only to say the word."
The first syllable of which I had not found time to say before we
marched full front into San Pablo's barrack-like café. A roar of
greeting sounded through the dense cloud of cigarette smoke:
"Buenas tardes! Don José!"
"Buenas, amigos! Que le gusta!" returned my companion, and
pushing toward a table with two vacant chairs he continued without
a break, "Un ponche, Don Gregario! And you, señor? Anything you
may choose, though there is nothing equal to ponche. Verdad,
Rufo?" Then as I opened my lips to express a preference, "Sí! sí!
Don Gregario! Dos ponches!"
The room was filled with a hundred bronze-tinted miners over
wine and cards. Don José was the industrial autocrat of every man
present, yet one would have fancied him rather a brother or cousin,
so free was the intercourse from haughtiness on the one hand and
servility on the other. Miner and manager addressed each other by
their given names, shouted at each other in friendly dispute,
thumped each other fraternally on the back. Despite all which one
felt absolute assurance that when labor again caught up its pick the
manager's word would command instant obedience.
The landlord, flushed with the exertion of their concoction, soon
set the incomparable beverages before us. With the alacrity of a
man who will have no shadow of debt hanging over his head, Don
José thrust a hand into a pocket of his alpaca and cast on the table
three mammoth coppers, the combined value of which was close
upon five cents. With the first sip he rolled a cigarette and pushed
pouch and papers toward me. Then having introduced me as "Señor
Newyorkano," he plunged headlong into the story of my life,
addressing not merely the assembled miners but whomever else
may have been prowling within gunshot of the building. "And to
think, amigos," he concluded, "after crossing all the sea el señor
should have wandered into San Pablo looking for a posada!"
The company beat their hands on the tables and howled with
merriment. Whatever the uproarious humor of that climax to my
adventures, it lost nothing of its poignancy as long as the evening
lasted, and served to top off a score of otherwise pointless tales.
 My ignorance of the Andalusian game notwithstanding, I had
soon taken a hand. The alcalde, consuming uncounted cigarettes,
beamed over my shoulder shouting praise of my sagacity each time I
cast on the table the card he pointed out. As for "ponche," what the
peerless libation lacked in favor with the masses it gained in the
unswerving fidelity of its sponsor. With clock-like regularity his
reverberating voice rang out above the din of revelry: "Don Gregario,
un ponche!" In vain did I announce my thirst permanently abated, in
vain did I "say the word" or strive at least to take advantage of the
free choice offered me. My protest was invariably drowned in the
roar of the amended order: "Sí, sí! Dos ponches, Don Gregario!"
Evening rolled into night, night into morning, and still the clank
of copper coins continued. Once I attempted to forestall the diving
into that fathomless alpaca by thrusting a hand into my own pocket.
My unquenchable host started to his feet with a bellow that seemed
to set the very walls vibrating:
"Strangers, señor, cannot spend money in San Pablo! We are a
private town!"
The minute hand was nearing the completion of its third lap
when a general uprising, subtly instigated by the landlord, swept the
carousers into the coal-black night. "My house" was no such regal
mansion as befitted an industrial sovereign, an alcalde, and a man of
unlimited coppers rolled into one. It was different, to be sure, from
the other bare stone dwellings of San Pablo, but only in the wild
bachelor disorder that reigned within its four naked walls. In one
corner was a mountainous husk mattress. Its mate, alleged my host,
lay somewhere buried in the jumble; and he verified the assertion
not long after by dragging it forth. While he was booting this into
some resemblance to a bed, I kicked off my shoes and sank into
profound slumber.
Don José, too, awoke at sunrise. His generosity, however, was
but a shadow of its former self. On the descent from the town he
listened to my objections to the proposed charity without once
proffering a reply. In the depth of the valley he halted and stared
gloomily up at the steep, sun-glazed path to the station observing
that Providence after all is the appointed guardian of the foolhardy. I
thrust out a hand. He shook it dejectedly and, bidding me go with
God and remember there is no drink equal to ponche, set out to
clamber his way back to the village.
Beyond the curve that swept San Pablo into the past a stream
brawled down out of the hills. I climbed a little way up the gorge
and came upon a tumbled boulder that had stored up a pool of just
the depth for a morning plunge. Further on the railway grew more
winding with every mile. The hills increased to mountain spurs, and
soon after came the mountains themselves, the parched and rock-
tumbled Sierra de Honda, fertile only with the memory of smugglers
and intricate pathways. The route led through many long, sombrous
tunnels, entrance into which from the blazing sunshine was like the
diving into a mountain lake. Where the burrowings ended, the line
became still more circuitous, leaping over abysmal, jagged gulleys
by massive dry bridges.
I fasted all the day; for it was Sunday, and the few station
buildings that appeared were deserted. Yet the privation passed
almost unnoticed. Were a choice to be made I would willingly
sacrifice any day's dinner for the unfailing sunshine of Spain,
reinforced by the pleasure of knowing that with the new dawn
another unclouded day will begin.

A Moorish gate of Ronda

My night's halt was beneath swaying palm-trees.

Down through a ravine beside the track were scattered a few
rambling houses, in one of which I found accommodations. Its
owner was a peasant, battered with years, who sat before his
dwelling smoking in the cool of evening with his three sons. One of
these was a guardia civil who had seen all the provinces of Spain,
and whose language in consequence was Spanish. His brothers, on
the other hand, spoke the crabbed dialect of Andalusia. I caught the
sense of most of their remarks only at the third or forth repetition, to
their ever-increasing astonishment.
 A gitana of Granada. In the district of the
Alhambra.

"Hermano," interrupted the guardia once, "you know you do not

speak Spanish?"
 The speaker fell silent and listened for some time open-mouthed
to his brother in uniform.
"Caracoles!" he cried suddenly. "I speak no other tongue than
you, brother, except for the fine words you have picked up at las
Cortes!"
Which was exactly the difficulty. The "fine" words were of pure
Castilian, for which the rural andaluz substitutes terms left behind by
the Moor. Furthermore his speech is guttural, explosive, slovenly,
more redolent of Arabic than of Spanish. He is particularly prone to
slight the S. His version of "estes señores" is "ete señore." Which is
comprehensible; but how shall the stranger guess that "cotóa e' l'
jutí'a" is meant to convey the information that "la justicia es
costosa?"
My evening meal consisted of a gazpacho, olives, eggs, cherries,
blood-dripping pomegranates, a rich brown bread, and wine; my
couch of a straw mattress in a corner of the great kitchen--and my
reckoning was barely twelve cents.
Afoot with the dawn, I had soon entered the vast cork forest
that covers all the northern slope of the sierra. Wherever a siding
offered, stood long rows of open freight cars piled high with bales of
the spongy bark; the morning "mixto" hobbled by bearing southward
material seemingly sufficient to stop all the bottles in Christendom.
By rail Ronda was still a long day distant--but not afoot. Before
the morning was old I came upon the beginning of the short-cut
which my hosts of the night had described. It straggled uncertainly
upward for a time across a rolling sandy country knobbed with tufts
of withered grass and overspread with mammoth cork-trees, some
still unbarked, some standing stark naked in the blistering sun. Then
all at once, path, sand and vegetation ceased, and above me
stretched to the very heavens the grilling face of a bare rock. I
mounted zigzagging, as up the slate roof of some gigantic church,
swathed in a heat that burned through the very soles of my shoes. A
mile up, two guardias civiles emerged suddenly from a fissure, the
sun glinting on their muskets and polished black three-cornered
hats. Here, then, of all places, was to be my first meeting with these
officious fellows, whose inquisitiveness was reported the chief
drawback to a tramp in Spain. But they greeted me with truly
Spanish politeness, even cordiality. Only casually, when we had
chatted a bit, as is wont among travelers meeting on the road, did
one of them suggest:
"You carry, no doubt, señor, your personal papers?"
I dived into my shirt--my knapsack, and drew out my passport.
The officers admired it a moment side by side without making so
bold as to touch it, thanked me for privilege, raised a forefinger to
their hats, and stalked on down the broiling rock.
A full hour higher I brought up against a sheer precipice. Of the
town that must be near there was still not a trace. For some time
longer I marched along the foot of the cliff, swinging half round a
circle and always mounting. Then all at once the impregnable wall
gave way, a hundred white stone houses burst simultaneously on my
sight, and I entered a city seething in the heat of noonday.

CHAPTER III
THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR
Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock so mighty that one
can easily fancy it the broken base of some pillar that once upheld
the sky. Nature seems here to have established division of labor. The
gigantic rock bearing aloft the city sustains of itself not a sprig of
vegetation. Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in summer to
fling down unburied the mutilated carcasses from her bullring,
spreads the encircling vega, producing liberally for the multitude
above, but granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel. Beyond
and round about stretches the sierra, having for its task to shelter
the city against prowling storms and to enrich the souls of her
inhabitants with its rugged grandeur.
Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere. As an
outlook upon the world she is well worth the coming; as a city she is
almost monotonous, with her squat, white-washed houses
sweltering in the omnivorous sunshine. Her only "sight" is the Tajo,
the "gash" in the living rock like the mark of some powerful
woodman's ax in the top of a tree-stump. A stork-legged bridge
spans it, linking two unequal sections of the town, which without this
must be utter strangers. A stream trickles along its bottom, how
deep down one recognizes only when he has noted how like toy
buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it pilfering their power.
Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the
enclosing mountains. The wonder is not that her inhabitants are
dreamy-eyed; rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the
spell of nature's setting to play their rôles in life's prosaic drama. As
for myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the
afternoon because she is Spanish, and because my supply of
currency was falling low. Ronda boasts no bank. Her chief dry-goods
merchant, however--by what right my informant could not guess--
boasts himself a banker. I found the amateur financier at home,
which chanced to be distant the height of one short stairway from
his place of business. When I had chatted an hour or two with his
clerks, the good man himself appeared, rosy with the exertions of
the siesta, and examined the ten-dollar check with many expressions
of gratitude for the opportunity.
"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating this obligation.
You will, of course, bring persons of my acquaintance to establish
your identity, como es costumbre in large financial transactions?"
I had never so fully realized how convincing was my command
of Spanish as when I had succeeded within an hour in convincing
this bond-slave of "costumbre" that express-checks are designed to
avoid just this difficulty. He expressed a desire to examine the
document more thoroughly and retired with it to the depths of his
establishment. Toward evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.
"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and shall pay you
fifty-seven pesetas, according to yesterday's quotation on the Borsa.
But I find I have such a sum on hand only in coppers."
"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the necessary
calculation, "something over thirty pounds. You will permit me,
señor, to express my deep gratitude--and to worry along for the time
being with the money in pocket."
Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature comforts can
never have been assigned the quarters a peseta won me for the
night in the "Parador de Vista Hermosa." The room was a house in
itself, peculiarly clean and home-like, and furnished not only with the
necessities of bed, chairs, and taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but
with table, washstand, and even a bar of soap, the first I had seen
in the land except that in my own knapsack. When the sun had
fallen powerless behind the sierra, I drew the green reed shade and
found before my window a little rejaed balcony hanging so directly
over the Tajo that the butt of a cigarette fell whirling down, down to
the very bottom of the gorge. I dragged a chair out into the dusk
and sat smoking beneath the star-sprinkled sky long past a
pedestrian's bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin far below
ascending to mingle with the murmur of the strolling city.
To the north of Ronda begins a highway that goes down
through a country as arid and rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon.
Here, too, is much of the Arab's contempt for roads. Donkeys
bearing singing men tripped by along hard-beaten paths just far
enough off the public way to be no part of it. Now and again donkey
and trail rambled away independently over the thirsty hills, perhaps
to return an hour beyond, more often to be swallowed up in the
unknown. The untraveled carretera lay inches deep in fine white
dust. Far and near the landscape was touched only with a few slight
patches of viridity. The solitary tree under which I tossed through an
hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering shade of a bean-pole.
Sharp-eyed with appetite, I came near, nevertheless, to passing
unseen early in the afternoon a village hidden in plain sight along
the flank of a reddish, barren hill. In this, too, Andalusia resembles
Asia Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same colored or colorless
rocks as the hills on which they are built as frequently to escape the
eye. I forded a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled pueblo.
Toward the end of the principal lack of a street one of the crumbling
hovel-fronts was scrawled in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent
indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters of the
alphabet:

Aqui se bende bino

Once admitted to the sleepy interior, I regaled myself on bread,

cheese, and "bino" and scrambled back to the highway. It wandered
more and more erratically, slinking often around hills that a bit of
exertion would have surmounted. I recalled the independence of the
donkeys and, picking up a path at an elbow of the route, struck off
across the rugged country.
But there is sound truth, as in all his venerable if somewhat
baggy-kneed proverbs, in the Spaniard's assertion that "no hay atajo
sin trabajo." In this short-cut there was work and to spare. As long
as the day lasted the way continued stiff and stony, ceaselessly
mounting or descending, with never a level of breathing-space
breadth nor a moment's respite from the rampant sunshine. A few
times I stumbled upon an inhabited heap of stones in a fold of the
hills. Man, at least fully clothed, seemed never before to have
strayed thus far afield. From each hutch poured forth a shaggy
fellow with his draggled mate and a flock of half-naked children, all
to stare speechlessly after me as long as the crown of my hat
remained in sight.
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