"Oh heavens! no, not yet!"
"Too bad! Try to make them popular in Italy also, and I will come to banderillar at Rome."
"I will do all in my power.—Señorita, have the goodness to tell me your name, so that I may bid you good-bye."
"Consuelo."
"God be with you, Consuelo!"
"God be with you, Señor Italiano!"
And I went out into the lonely little street.
There are no remarkable Arabian monuments to be seen in the neighborhood of Cordova, although at one time the whole valley was covered with magnificent buildings. Three miles to the south of the city, on the side of the mountain, rose the Medina Az-Zahra, the city of flowers, one of the most marvellous architectural works of the caliph Abdurrahman, begun by the caliph himself in honor of his favorite Az-Zahra. The foundations were laid in the year 936, and ten thousand workmen labored on the edifice for twenty-five years. The Arabian poets celebrated Medina Az-Zahra as the most splendid of royal palaces and the most delightfullyl garden in the world. It was not an edifice, but a vast chain of palaces, gardens, courts, colonnades, and towers. There were rare plants from Syria—the fantastic playing of lofty fountains, streams of water flowing in the shade of palm trees, and great basins overflowing with quicksilver, which reflected the rays of the sun like lakes of fire; doors of ebony and ivory studded with gems; thousands of columns of the most precious marbles; great airy balconies; and between the innumerable multitudes of statues twelve images of animals of massy gold, gleaming with pearls, sprinkling sweetened water from their mouths and noses. In this vast palace swarmed thousands of servants, slaves, and women, and hither from every part of the world came poets and musicians. And yet this same Abdurrahman III., who lived among all these delights, who reigned for fifty years, who was powerful, glorious, and fortunate in every circumstance and enterprise, wrote before his death that during his long reign he had been happy only fourteen days, and his fabulous city of flowers seventy-four years after the laying of its first stone was invaded, sacked, and burned by a barbarian horde, and to-day there remain only a few stones which hardly recall its name.
Of another splendid city, called Zahira, which rose to the east of Cordova, built by the powerful Almansur, governor of the kingdom, not even the ruins remain: a handful of rebels laid it in ashes a little while after the death of its founder.
"All returns to the great ancient mother."