CASTLE OF ST. SERVANDO.
(to quote Abon I Hasan), the Moorish bridge, near Santa Leocadia, and the other, which crossed the old Roman waterway, have disappeared, and the legendary Palace of Galiana is let out in miserable tenements to the lowest class of peasants.
Moratin has immortalised Galiana de Toledo, “most beautiful and marvellous,” and Calderon has written of the palace built for her by her father, Galafre, who ruled over Toledo for Abd-er-Rahman I. Galafre took the old Visigoth shell, and transformed the edifice, by the witchery of Moorish windows and arches and staircases, into a palace of delight. He devoted his knowledge of hydraulics to the unkempt Toledan Vega, and made of it a paradise of leaf and bloom and rill. In the fairy garden, Charlemagne, according to tradition, found the “most beautiful and marvellous” Galiana, and carried her away from the unwelcome addresses of her Moorish admirer, Prince Bradamante, to reign over France as his queen. The arms of the Guzmans, into whose possession the palace passed under Castillian rule, may still be descried upon its dismantled front.
The wonderful clepsydras, or water clocks of Toledo, the invention of Abou-l’-Casem, Abdo-er-Rahman, or Az-Zarcal, as he is more usually styled, are quaintly and vaguely described in the following Moorish document: “One of the greatest towns of Spain is Toledo, and Toledo is a large and well-populated city. On all sides it is washed by a splendid river, called the Tagus.... Among the rare and notable things of Toledo is that wheat may be kept more than seventy years without rotting, which is a great advantage, as all the land abounds in grain and seed of all kinds. But what is still more marvellous and surprising in Toledo, and what we believe no other inhabited town of all the world has anything to equal, are some clepsydras, or water clocks. It is said that Az-Zarcal, hearing of a certain talisman, which is in the city of Arin, of Eastern India, and which, Masudi says, shows the hours by means of aspas, or hands, from the time the sun rises till it sets, determined to fabricate an artifice by means of which the people could know the hour of day or night, and calculate the day of the moon. He made two great ponds in a house on the bank of the Tagus, not far from the Gate of the Tanners, making them so that they should be filled with water or emptied according to the rise and fall of the moon.”
In Babylonia, India, and Egypt, the clepsydra was used from before the dawn of history, especially in astronomical observations, and Latin and Greek writers refer to a type which resembled the modern sand glass, and was used in the courts of law to limit the length of the pleadings. The general form of the clepsydra, which Pliny ascribed to Scipio Nasica, consisted essentially of a float, which slowly rose by the tricklings of water from above through a small hole in a plate of metal. As the float rose it pointed to a scale of hours at the side of the water vessel; or, in the more elaborate forms, moved a wheel by means of a ratchet, and thus turned a hand on a dial.
The Moorish recounter of the wonders of the water clocks of Toledo tells us that its movements were regulated by the moon. As soon as the moon became visible by means of invisible conducts, the water began to flow into the ponds, and, by day rise, the ponds were four-sevenths full. At night another seventh was added, so that by day or night the ponds continued to increase in water a seventh every twenty-four hours, and were quite full by the time the moon was full. On the 14th of the month, when the moon began to fall, the ponds also fell in like proportion. On the 21st of the month they were half empty, and on the 29th
