Their Deserted Seats Are Mostly To Be Seen After
You Pass Through The Moorish Gate Overarching The Stony, Dusty, Weedy
Road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood.
The arch, so gracefully
Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem
obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the
south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost
preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps
it was not more utterly outdated than the residences of the nobles who
had once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as
irrevocably merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.
VI
Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the
hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the
state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street
had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning. But
I am sure those ladies could have been of noble descent only in the
farthest possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were even
remotely related to the haughty ox-team which blocked the way in front
of the palaces and obliged xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted
round the cart. Our driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver of the
ox-team preserved a calm as perfect as if he had been an hidalgo
interested by the incident before his gate.
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