While We Wandered
Toward The Mosque A Woman Robed In White Cotton, With A Lavender Scarf
Crossing Her Breast, Came
In as irrelevantly as the orange trees and
stood as stably as the palms; in her night-black hair she
Alone in
Cordova redeemed the pledge of beauty made for all Andalusian women by
the reckless poets and romancers, whether in ballads or books of travel.
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.
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