One Enters The Court By A Gate In A Richly Yellow Tower, With A Shrine
To St. Michael Over The Door, And Still Higher At The Lodging Of The
Keeper A Bed Of Bright Flowers.
Then, however, one is confronted with
the first great disappointment in the mosque.
Shall it be whispered in
awe-stricken undertone that the impression of a bull-ring is what
lingers in the memory of the honest sight-seer from his first glance at
the edifice? The effect is heightened by the filling of the arcades
which encircle it, and which now confront the eye with a rounded wall,
where the Saracenic horseshoe remains distinct, but the space of yellow
masonry below seems to forbid the outsider stealing knowledge of the
spectacle inside. The spectacle is of course no feast of bulls (as the
Spanish euphemism has it), but the first amphitheatrical impression is
not wholly dispersed by the sight of the interior. In order that the
reader at his distance may figure this, he must imagine an indefinite
cavernous expanse, with a low roof supported in vaulted arches by some
thousand marble pillars, each with a different capital. There used to be
perhaps half a thousand more pillars, and Charles V. made the Cordovese
his reproaches for destroying the wonder of them when they planted their
proud cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of
sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there are still
enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns left, and enough of
those arches, striped in red and white with their undeniable suggestion
of calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or
a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings of those colors.
One sees the sanctuary where the great Caliph said his prayers, and the
Koran written by Othman and stained with his blood was kept; but I know
at least one traveler who saw it without sentiment or any sort of
reverent emotion, though he had not the authority of the "old rancid
Christianity" of a Castilian for withholding his homage. If people would
be as sincere as other people would like them to be, I think no one
would profess regret for the Arab civilization in the presence of its
monuments. Those Moors were of a religion which revolts all the finer
instincts and lifts the soul with no generous hopes; and the records of
it have no appeal save to the love of mere beautiful decoration. Even
here it mostly fails, to my thinking, and I say that for my part I found
nothing so grand in the great mosaue of Cordova as the cathedral which
rises in the heart of it. If Abderrahman boasted that he would rear a
shrine to the joy of earthly life and the hope of an earthly heaven, in
the place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should
like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would have to say to the
saint whose shrine he demolished.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 111 of 197
Words from 57569 to 58081
of 103320
