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.
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