It Is No Longer
The Center Of Learning; And Though It Cannot Help Doing A Large Business
In Olives, With The Orchards Covering The Hills Around It, The Business
Does Not Seem To Be A Very Active One.
"The city once the abode of the
flower of Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent O'Shea in his
_Guide to
Spain, "_is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the
absentee senorio; their 'solares' are desert and wretched, the streets
ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and
denuded of all art and meaning, either past or present." Baedeker gives
like reasons for thinking "the traveler whose expectation is on tiptoe
as he enters the ancient capital of the Moors will probably be
disappointed in all but the cathedral." _Cook's Guide,_ latest but not
least commendable of the authorities, is of a more divided mind and
finds the means of trade and industry and their total want of visible
employment at the worst anomalous.
Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only
an endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers or
sellers to speak of, and a tangle of squat white houses, abounding in
lovely _patios,_ sweet and bright with flowers and fountains: this seems
to be Cordova in the consensus of the manuals, and with me in the
retrospect a sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead
capital of the Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years ago
he thought (and there has not been much change since), that "Cordova has
a more African look than any other city of Andalusia; its streets, or
rather its lanes, whose tumultuous pavement resembles the bed of dry
torrents, all littered with straw from the loads of passing donkeys,
have nothing that recalls the manners and customs of Europe. The Moors,
if they came back, would have no great trouble to reinstate themselves.
. . . The universal use of lime-wash gives a uniform tint to the
monuments, blunts the lines of the architecture, effaces the
ornamentation, and forbids you to read their age. . . . You cannot know
the wall of a century ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once the
center of Arab civilization, is now a huddle of little white houses with
corridors between them where two mules could hardly pass abreast. Life
seems to have ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the active
circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but the blanched and
calcined skeleton. ... In spite of its Moslem air, Cordova is very
Christian and rests under the special protection of the Archangel
Raphael." It is all rather contradictory; but Gautier owns that the
great mosque is a "monument unique in the world, and novel even for
travelers who have had the fortune to admire the wonders of Moorish
architecture at Granada or Seville."
De Amicis, who visited Cordova nearly forty-five years later, and in the
heart of spring, brought letters which opened something of the intimate
life of that apparently blanched and calcined skeleton.
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