THE MOSQUE—PILASTERS AND ARABIAN BATHS.
Alonso Manriquez, who had erected the incongruous edifice, in no measured terms. “You have built here,” said the king, “what you or anyone might have built elsewhere; but you have spoilt what was unique in the world.” Alas! the monarch had forgotten, or did not choose to remember, that the reprimand came with a very bad grace from one who, for his never-completed palace at Granada, had torn down whole courts and halls of the Alhambra.
The mosque of Cordova is still to-day, by universal consent, the most beautiful Mussulman temple, and one of the most wonderful architectural monuments in the world. The susceptible Italian author, Edmondo de Amicis, has given us a vividly picturesque description of his first impression of the interior of the building. “Imagine a forest,” he says, “fancy yourself in the thickest portion of it, and that you can see nothing but the trunks of trees. So, in this mosque, on whatever side you look, the eye loses itself among the columns. It is a forest of marble, whose confines one cannot discover. You follow with your eye, one by one, the very long rows of columns that interlace at every step with numberless other rows, and you reach a semi-obscure background, in which other columns seem to be gleaming. There are nineteen aisles, which extend from north to south, traversed by thirty-three others, supported (among them all) by more than nine hundred columns of porphyry, jasper, breccia, and marbles of every colour. Each column upholds a small pilaster, and between them runs an arch, and a second one extends from pilaster to pilaster, the latter placed above the former, and both of them in the form of a horseshoe; so that in imagining the columns to be the trunks of so many trees, the arches represent the branches, and the similitude of the mosque to a forest is complete. The middle aisle, much broader than the others, ends in front of the “maksurrah,” which is the most sacred part of the temple, where the Koran was worshipped. Here, from the windows in the ceiling, falls a pale ray of light that illuminates a row of columns; there is a dark spot; farther on falls a second ray, which lights another aisle. It is impossible to express the feeling of mysterious surprise which that spectacle arouses in your soul. It is like the sudden revelation of an unknown religion, nature, and life, which bears away your imagination to the delight of that paradise, full of love and voluptuousness, where the blessed, seated under the shade of leafy palm trees and thornless rose bushes, drink from crystal vases the wine, sparkling like pearls, mixed by immortal children, and take their repose in the arms of charming black-eyed virgins! All the pictures of eternal pleasure, which the Koran promises to the faithful, present themselves to your bright mind, gleaming and vivid, at the first sight of the mosque, and cause you a sweet momentary intoxication, which leaves in your heart an indescribable sort of melancholy! A brief tumult of the mind, and a spark of fire rushes through your brain—such is the first sensation one experiences upon entering the cathedral of Cordova.”
Listen again to the musings of this same impressionable writer, as he gazes at the ceiling and walls of the principal chapel, the only part of the mosque that is quite intact. “It is,” he says, “a dazzling gleam of crystals of a thousand colours, a network of arabesques, which puzzles the mind, and a complication of bas-reliefs, gildings, ornaments, minutiæ of design and colouring, of a delicacy, grace and perfection sufficient to drive the most patient painter distracted. It is impossible to retain any of the pretentious work in the mind. You might turn a hundred times to look at it, and it would only seem to you, in thinking it over, a
CORDOVA
INSCRIPTIONS AND ARABIAN CHAPTERS.