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.
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. 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. If Abderrahman boasted that he would rear a
shrine to the joy of earthly life and the hope of an earthly heaven, in
the place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should
like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would have to say to the
saint whose shrine he demolished. I think the saint would have the
better of him in any contention for their respective faiths, and could
easily convince the impartial witness that his religion then abiding in
medieval gloom was of promise for the future which Islam can never be.
Yet it cannot be denied that when Abderraham built his mosque the Arabs
of Cordova were a finer and wiser people than the Christians who dwelt
in intellectual darkness among them, with an ideal of gloom and
self-denial and a zeal for aimless martyrdom which must have been very
hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and scholars were
what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to have become, with a
primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond the learning of all other
Europe in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters of religion;
polite agnostics, who disliked extremely the passion of some Christians
dwelling among them for getting themselves put to death, as they did,
for insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people
of culture in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman's mind in wishing to
substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the
medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have had
their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was completed. 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.
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