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.
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