MAIN STREET IN GIBRALTAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 24, 27 July 1940, Page 18

MAIN STREET IN GIBRALTAR

AS soon as you enter the town of Gibraltar—through a deep and solid archway with iron doors—you feel that you are in a fortress, writes A. S. Hildebrand in the "Christian Science Monitor." Though the town is so delightful and gives you so warm a welcome, it is stern, bristling with authority, and insists on a grave and serious view of life. Wherever you want to go, there is a sentry to pass, and, though he allows you to proceed, you proceed on your good behaviour. Even if you duck out of sigh! around the corner, there is th Rock, filling half the sky, and you know that unseen —and critical —watchers are lookinig down at you. The officer on guard the gate gives you a dated ticket as you enter; you may remain in town until "first evening gunfire." You feel specially privileged, at once, and become self-con-sciously innocent in everything you do. . . . The gateway through which you come in is characteristic, in its solidity, of the entire establishment. You come upon fortifications, unexpectedly, in the most ordinary streets; there are barracks wherever there is room for them to stand; batteries border the park; there are impassive and substantial buildings everywhere, tightly closed, with letters and numbers of military connotation painted on their doors. . . . The streets are noisy with the languages of a dozen nations, and confused with heterogeneous costumes and traffic that never elsewhere get together. The carriages are light, bouncing, canopy-topped things, with white curtains looped back at the corners of their roofs, quaint and fantastic, as if they were made up to please a child; they go rattling through the crowds. There are Greeks and

Spaniards and Hindus, Levantine Jews, Arabs from Mogador, Moors from Tangiers, Egyptians and Italians and wandering mariners from everywhere. And mingled with these, shoulder to shoulder with them in the narrow streets, are the British residents and the native Gibraltarians, soldiers from the garrison, and sailors from the dockyard. The turmoil and clatter of all this make the town hum with , a sound like that of a metropolis.

Indeed, it is as busy and excited as if it were the very centre of the world. It is a perpetual World's Fair. It is like that "Everywhere" that exists in the imagination. Yet the British residents consider themselves colonists, living in an outpost, and not infrequently they spend a great deal of their time in wondering when they will get away. .... ;

The shops are filled with wonderful things from every corner of the earth. The windows glitter with glass and inlaid work ahd jewels, while the flaming scarves and mantillas and embroideries that hang beside the doors give the street the colour of a true Oriental bazaar. It is, in fact, a cosmopolitan bazaar. There is nothing, almost, that you can imagine, that cannot be found here—Quaker Oats or bronze Buddhas. Bagdad is - represented, and Timbuktu and Lancashire and Samarkand and Baltimore. And in the background of all this are the sedate Government buildings, with the sentries at their doors, and the Bobbies, in the familiar London uniforms, keeping order.

A Moor from Tangiers passes, in his flowing robes of white, his red fez, his yellow slippers, and bare brown legs; as you are trying to recover from the surprise of it, you look up and discover that you are staring at a sign on the corner of the nearest house: "Main Street." Walking down Main Street, in his native costume, a Moor from Tangiers, who, perhaps, got out of bed in Africa that very morning. And you seem the only person who is surprised.

ment in days when the West existed under the law of lead.

About its streets the State has erected such signs as "at this point Wyatt Earp faced a mob of 300" and stood off their violence until his prisoner and friend, "Johnny Behind the Deuce," could escape into a bowling alley.

Just north of Tombstone stands the old Boothill Cemetery, and from its lofty location affords a sweeping vista. Scattered about are hundreds of unmarked mounds of rock, unchanged and unchanging in the West's dry, desert.- air. Far in the distance rise the Dragoon Mountains, dry, blazing, forbidding, and nof> far away across the desert fiats is a famous old Arizona monument, the Cochise stronghold, in the midst of the Coronado National Forest.

The town lies on U.S. Highway 80, between Tucson and Douglas, and near enough to the Mexican border to have been handy for the boys who felt safer in Mexico when the frontier marshals buckled on their heavy black guns some sixty years ago. It is off the generally beaten route and most visitors in this day visit Tombstone on a one-day trip, even in deep summer, from Phoenix, via the Casa Grande National Monument.

The grave of Billy the Kid is a forlorn reminder of the most feared and romantic gunman of the West, whose prowess and amazing daring dimmed eveji the infamous renown of Jesse James. At twenty William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, had carved twenty-one notches on his well-worn gun, and throughout Western Texas, New Mexico, and the Indian country of Eastern. Arizona his name was one to inspire a quickened pulse and a sudden posse.

Near old Fort Sumner, where his grave lies, the Pecos River winds its meandering and lazy course through grooves of pleasant cottonwoods. The grave lies in an old military cemetery, long since abandoned, and even the modei-n peons who till the alfalfa and corn fields along the bank of the river know Billy the Kid only as a grave in a forgotten little cemetery miles from even a through highway.

The visitor will find it difficult to locate the grave, approximately ten miles from modern Fort Sumner. But off through the farmlands, where a perpetual dry wind blows from the upland ranges of New Mexico, he will eventually come to the tiny plot where there are only four graves of note— Billy's and those of his two cronies, and that of Peter Maxwell, a respectable Western pioneer.

Billy's grave is side by side with those of O'Folliard and Bowdre, whose names were almost as notorious as Bonneys in the eighties. Enclosing the three is a wire fence, and a monument surmounts the three —a small stone, rising spectrally in the fields where Billy the Kid grew up and learned to rule with a Winchester and a Colt. The inscription: "Pals: Tom •O'Folliavd, died December, 1880; Charlie Bowdre, died December, 1880; William H. Bonney. alias Billy the Kid, died July, 1881."

Near the foot of Billy's grave is a comparatively new monument, set up by a Westerner with historical bent, and it reads: "The boy bandit king, he died as he had lived—Born Nov. 23, 1860; killed July 14, 1881."

Bonney was killed by the famous Western peace officer Pat Garrett, who surprised him hiding in an adobe shack in old Fort Sumner, a town made famous in early Indian wars. To Fort Sumner Ki+ Carson brought tribes of warlike Navajos and Apaches, which he had rounded up in the early eighteen sixties. The fort was abandoned in 1869.