We Were Indeed Weltering In A Closed Carriage,
Which Found Its Way Not So Badly Through The Alleys Where Two Mules
Could Not Pass Abreast.
The lime-wash of the walls did not emit the
white heat in which tho other tourists have basked or baked; the houses
looked wet and chill, and if they had those flowered and fountained
_patios_ which people talk of they had taken them in out of the rain.
VI
At the mosque the _patio_ was not taken in only because it was so large,
but I find by our records that it was much molested by a beggar who
followed us when we dismounted at the gate of the Court of Oranges, and
all but took our minds off the famous Moorish fountain in the midst. It
was not a fountain of the plashing or gushing sort, but a noble great
pool in a marble basin. The women who clustered about it were not
laughing and chattering, or singing, or even dancing, in the right
Andalusian fashion, but stood silent in statuesque poses from which they
seemed in no haste to stir for filling their water jars and jugs. The
Moorish tradition of irrigation confronting one in all the travels and
histories as a supreme agricultural advantage which the Arabs took back
to Africa with them, leaving Spain to thirst and fry, lingers here in
the circles sunk round the orange trees and fed by little channels. The
trees grew about as the fancy took them, and did not mind the
incongruous palms towering as irregularly above them.
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