THROUGH THE HEART
OF THE
MOORISH EMPIRE
The spell of mystery is still upon Morocco. The Moors are still the people of romance. Of the land we know comparatively little; of the race as it exists to-day we know still less. Christendom assumes that the Moorish Empire expired with the last sigh of Boabdil, leaving the Alhambra as its only legacy.
Almost novel is the thought that the Moors still live as a nation; that Morocco is to-day what Spain would have become had the forces of the Prophet prevailed in the Peninsula. Who would not welcome as a precious privilege the possibility of turning back the pages of history in Spain, to revel in the actual Moorish life as it was lived before the Christian victories of 1492? Who would not gladly leave, at least for a short space, the familiar round of present-day existence and the hackneyed paths of travel, to plunge into a past so picturesque, to see a civilization so refined and yet so utterly unlike our own? No reader of Washington Irving but has longed to people with white-clad cavaliers the courts on the Alhambra Hill, to hear the Arab accents in the streets of old Granada, or the murmuring of the Moslem prayers in the old mosques. But why persist in holding Spain to be the sole stage on which the Moors appropriately can play their parts?
ON THE ROAD TO MEQUINEZ
ON THE ROAD TO MEQUINEZ