which sink into comparative insignificance beside its glorious neighbour, the Gate of the Sun.
This magnificent gate of rough stone, with its towers of brown granite, has been rightly described as one of the world’s masterpieces. Yet here again the pen is powerless to do justice to its beauty; and to describe its proportions and decoration is to complicate, rather than explain, the impression that is conveyed by the camera. The square towers, with their semi-circular fronts, and the great central arch resting on two Moorish columns, and the zones of ornamental arches above the horse-shaped openings, comprise a Moorish gem against a Spanish sky, a miracle of loveliness upon a rough and naked rampart. But how, cries Hannah Lynch, to write of this Puerta del Sol, that “thing of beauty even among crowded enchantments! It is to pick one’s way through superlatives and points of exclamation and call in vain on the goddess of sobriety to subdue our tendency to excess and incoherence. Put this matchless gate in the middle of the desert of Sahara; it would then be worth while making the frightful journey alone to look at it. However far you may have journeyed, you would still be for ever thankful to have seen such a masterpiece—incontestably a work of supreme art, perhaps the rarest thing of the world.” Whether the writer intends her high eulogy to be applied generally to any “work of supreme art,” or to the Puerta del Sol in particular, most people who have come under the witching influence of the art of the Moors, will not deny that it is well deserved.
PLATE L.
Rafters of a Roof over a Doorway, now destroyed, beneath the Tocador de la Reyna.
