If
They Recognized It As A Concession To The General Preference, They Could
Do So Without The Discomfort Which They
Must have suffered when some new
horde of Berbers, full of faith and fight, came over from Africa to push
Back the encroaching Spanish frontier, and give the local Christians as
much martyrdom as they wanted.
It is all a conjecture based upon material witness no more substantial
than that which the Latin domination left long centuries before the
Arabs came to possess the land. The mosque from which you drive through
the rain to the river is neither newer nor older looking than the
beautiful Saracenic bridge over the Guadalquivir which the Arabs
themselves say was first built by the Romans in the time of Augustus;
the Moorish mill by the thither shore might have ground the first wheat
grown in Europe. It is intensely, immemorially African, flat-roofed,
white-walled; the mules waiting outside in the wet might have been
drooping there ever since the going down of the Flood, from which the
river could have got its muddy yellow.
If the reader will be advised by me he will not go to the Archaeological
Museum, unless he wishes particularly to contribute to the support of
the custodian; the collection will not repay him even for the time in
which a whole day of Cordova will seem so superabundant. Any little
street will be worthier his study, with its type of passing girls in
white and black mantillas, and its shallow shops of all sorts, their
fronts thrown open, and their interiors flung, as it were, on the
sidewalk.
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