From The Tower Of Leon Cathedral

( Originally Published 1905 )

LEON is a most attractive city with fine gardens, fine public buildings and a very affable and approachable people. I was told that the view from the cathedral tower was superb, and as I was to leave the city the following morning I took advantage of the quiet Sunday afternoon to pass a couple of hours on the tower. The cathedral is a massive and really magnificent pile, unsurpassed by any building in Latin America. It is a firm mass of masonry, built of cut stone, whose mortared joints have solidified into an imperishable material, forming, with the travertine, an indestructable whole. Its dignity and grace and quiet grandeur have given a new glory and importance to material substance, and brings home to the mind the sublime faith of the builders who raised this imperishable temple to an imperishable God. It covers an entire square, took thirty-seven years of incessant labour to build, and cost, I am told, five million dollars. Under a great dome, whose figured windows flood it with a wealth and variety of chromatic colouring, reposes the High Altar of variegated marble, elaborately carved. The panelling of the altar is of silver plates, chased and embossed. The beautiful side chapels, the railings of Spanish marble, its lofty ceiling, and its great bells, mellowed with age, give to this consecrated fane an immortality of quiet grandeur and sacred romance.

In a spacious room opening into the vestry and known as the Bishops' Hall are hung the portraits in oil of all the prelates of Nicaragua, beginning with the saintly Valdivieso, the Thomas a Becket of Central America, and ending with the present occupant of the See of Leon, Monseigneur De Verrara, the forty-fourth since the foundation of the diocese in 1527. Some of these portraits are the productions of famous foreign artists, and even those of the native portrait painters hold your attention for a time. It is a room of historic memories Where dedicated shapes of saints, Stern faces, bleared with unwearied watch, Look down, benignly grave, and seem to say: Ye come and go incessant, we remain Safe in the hallowed quiet of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this."

These paintings, if they had a voice, could tell the history of Central America from the conquest until now. They could record the heroic self-sacrifice of the Spanish missionary fathers who gave themselves to the splendid task of bearing life and hope and decency to the Pueblo tribes and roaming hordes from Patagonia to New Mexico. During the civil wars this cathedral was perverted into a fortress, and to this day every foot of its western wall shows the marks of bullets, and records the miserable marksmanship of the Nicaraguans. The rapacity of the revolutionists despoiled it of its ornaments and contributary wealth, their contempt for the House of God covering even the altar of sacrifice, which they stripped of its silver panels and candlesticks.

From the majestic towers of this imposing minster the view is magnificent. Nine of the twenty-four volcanic mountains of Nicaragua cut the horizon towards the Pacific Ocean and were sharply outlined against a background of delicate sky-blue. These destroyers of long ago are now cold, voiceless, and grimly silent, but some of them to-day are troubled in their sleep, and make known ominously, by the rising sulphurous smoke and the steam escaping from their cavernous depths, the fires blazing within them and the heat and power smouldering in their craters. The jaws of the monsters are yet foul with black gore, their shaggy ridges and huge lava muscles bearing witness to their desolating strength. Dominating all is the awful antiquity of what you are looking at—a sensation, as of old, finding utterance in that tremendous question of Eliphaz the Temanite to the unhappy Job, " Wast thou brought forth before the hills ?" There was about them a weirdness that approached the ghostly and almost the ghastly.

The last great eruption of Masaya, the nearest to the city, happened about two hundred years ago, and so the people laugh at you if you speak of danger to come. They forget that two hundred years in the earth's life are but as two minutes in the life of a man, and that what a man did two minutes since he may do again. From our position we looked down upon the Cuartel General or army headquarters, the governor's residence, the bishop's palace, and the Tridentine College of St. Ramoan, established two hundred and thirty years ago. We could see the sentries pacing back and forth before the Government House and the general's quarters, the people in the plaza and a long line of burros or donkeys freighted with fodder for the cavalry stables. Up through the lambent air there came to us strange noises, indefinable sounds, heard only by those lifted above a large city. Far away to the east and north-east as far as the eye could carry were the dark blue waters of the Pacific, and between it and us were the wonderful forests of mahogany, the great cattle ranches, and the haciendas of the land owners. We could see as we looked southward the aureole of strangely beautiful palms around the lake of Managua, the orange groves, and coffee plantations, the cabins of the farm hands clustering into villages.

It was well on in the afternoon when we left the tower, and as the sun sank lower, the west changed to crimson, bringing out the royal palms of Managua in bold relief against the sky. Now dipped the sun behind the horizon, a horizon of rich, golden, salmon pink, merging into the deep blue of turquoise, and finally into the cold gray of evening through which the stars shone with strange and almost material lustre. On my return to the hotel I had for my vis-a-vis at the dinner table Dr. Rene Gaurez, who had come down from Cordova to attend a medical convention. He was a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts, with courteous manners, spoke various languages, and was an encyclopaedia of information on Central America. He subscribed for the Lancet, and was well informed on English therapeutics, praised the king for his deep and sympathetic interest in the study now being made of cancer, and Sir Thomas Lipton for his munificent contribution to the hospital established by His Majesty for the treatment of this disease. Our conversation drifted into a discussion on the diseases peculiar to cold climates. I told him of the efforts we were making to fight consumption—the "White Plague," as it was popularly known among us. " White Plague," lie repeated, "a very appropriate name for a most insidious and treacherous disease. Among us we have found lemon juice to be a most efficient remedy for consumption in its primary and secondary stages, and an excellent remedy in all pulmonary diseases."

To my question touching its preparation the doctor replied :