At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed hat-covers and capes. "Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall upon us unawares?" I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived, however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to shine again. On our arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once; they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. "One more escape!" sighed Velveteen, fervently.
Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical latitude by great activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small manufacture—shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner.
"Cordovan leather" still holds it own, on a petty scale, and the small cups hammered out of old silver dollars constitute, with filigree silver-work, a characteristic local product. The faces of the people betrayed their gypsy blood oftentimes, and there was one street chiefly occupied by the Romany folk. Traces of blond or light chestnut hair showed that the Moorish stock had likewise left some offshoots that do not die out. The whole aspect of Cordova presents at once a reflex of the refined and enlightened spirit of the ancient caliphate. Everybody, including most of the beggars, has a fresh and cleanly appearance; the very priests undergo a change, being frequently more refined in feature and of a more tolerant expression than those of the North. The women set off their rosy brown complexions and black hair with clusters of rayed jasmine blossoms, flattened and ingeniously fixed in rosette form on long pins. The men, discarding those hot felt hats so obstinately worn in the central provinces, make a comfortable and festive appearance in their curling Panamas. On the Street of the Great Captain—the chief open-air resort, commemorating Gonsalvo of Cordova, who led so ably in the triumphant Christian campaigns—the people laugh and chat as if they really enjoyed life. There is a great deal of wealth in the place, and the lingering atmosphere of its past greatness is not depressing, as that of Toledo is, for it was never the home of bigotry and ignorance. Its prosperous epoch under Abdur-rahman and his Ommeyad successors was one of brilliant civilization. It was then a nursery of science and the arts; its inhabitants numbered a million. It had mosques by the hundred, and nearly a thousand baths—for the Spanish Moors well knew the civilizing virtue of water, and kept life-giving streams of it running at the roots of their institutions. The houses of the modern city are very plain on the exterior, and their common coat of whitewash imparts to them a democratic equality, though aristocracy is still a living thing there, instead of having sunk into pitfalls of squalor and idleness, as in the sombre city by the Tagus.
"But now the Cross is sparkling on the mosque,
And bells make Catholic the trembling air."
Gloomy little churches crop out in every quarter, and a few convents of nuns remain, where you may hear the faint, sad litany of the unseen sisters murmured behind the grating, while a priest chants service for them in the lonely chapel. The bells of these churches and of the mosque-cathedral are hardly ever silent; the brazen jargon of their tongues echoes over the roofs at all hours, and the hollow, metallic tinkle of mule-bells from the otherwise silent streets at times strikes one as making response to them. The beauty of the cathedral—still called the Mezquita (mosque)—lies almost solely in the preservation of its original Moorish architecture.
The site was first occupied as a place of worship by the Roman Temple of Janus, and this in turn became a basilica of the Gothic Christians. Abdur-rahman, after the Christians had long been allowed by the caliphs to continue their worship in one half of the basilica, reared the supremely wonderful House of Purification as it now stands; and then, after the conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, in the reign of Charles V., the cumbrous high altar and choir, which choke up so much of the interior, transformed it once more into a stronghold of Christian ceremonial. But when you enter at the Gate of Pardon the long, wide Court of Oranges, you find yourself transported instantly to Mohammedan surroundings; you are under the dominion of the Ommeyades.
