Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

To the imagination the Córdoba of to-day is wholly a deception. Yet she may rest assured that she will not be entirely forgotten so long as her one lion, the cathedral, or more properly her chief mosque, remains. For in spite of Christian desecration, in spite of the crippled old women who are incessantly drawing water in its Patio of the Orange-trees, despite even the flabby, cynical priests that loaf in the shade of the same, smoking their cigarettes, and the beggars at its doors like running sores on the landscape, the Mesdjid al-Dijâmi of Córdoba does not, like many a far-heralded "sight," bring disappointment. Once in the cool stillness of its forest of pillars one may still drift back into the gone centuries and rebuild and repeople in fancy the sumptuous days of the Moor.

This reconstruction of the past was not uninterrupted, however, on the morning of my visit. For in the church, that heavy-featured intruder within the mosque like a toadstool that has sprung up through some broken old Etruscan vase, mass was celebrating. I crossed before the open door and glanced in. Some thirty strapping, well-fed priests were lounging in the richly-carved choir stalls, chanting a resonant wail that was of vast solace, no doubt, to some unhappy soul writhing in purgatory. There was not the shadow of a worshiper in the building. Yet these able-bodied and ostensibly sane men croaked on through their chants as serious-featured as if all the congregation of Córdoba were following their every syllable with reverent awe.

They interfered not in the least with sight-seeing, however, being, as I have said, in the church proper, an edifice wholly distinct from the mosque and one which none but a conscientious tourist or a fervent Catholic would care to enter. There were, nevertheless, certain annoyances, in the persons of a half-dozen blearing crones and as many ragged and officious urchins, who crowded about offering, nay, thrusting upon me their services as guides.

In time I shook off all but one ugly fellow of about fifteen, who hung irrepressibly on my heels. Mass ended soon after, and the priests filed out into the mosque chatting and rolling cigarettes, and wandered gradually away. One of them, however, catching sight of me, advanced and clutching my would-be guide by the slacker portions of his raiment, sent him spinning toward the door.

"Es medio loco, eso," he said, stepping forward with a shifty smile and nudging me with an elbow, "a half-witted fellow who will trouble you no more. With your permission I will show you all that is to be seen, and it shall cost you nothing."

I accepted the offer, not because any guidance was necessary, or even desirable, but glad of every opportunity for closer acquaintance and observation of that most disparaged class of Spanish society. To one to whom not only all creeds, but each of the world's half-dozen real religions sum up to much the same total, the general condemnation of the priesthood of Spain had hitherto seemed but another example of prejudice.

This member of the order was a man of forty, stoop-shouldered, his tonsure merging into a frontal baldness, with the face and manners of a man-about-town and a frequenter of the Tenderloin. For three sentences, perhaps, he conversed as any pleasant man of the world might with a stranger. Then we paused to view several paintings of the Virgin. They were images deeply revered by all true Catholics, yet this smirking fellow began suddenly to comment on them in a string of lascivious indecencies which even I, who have no reverence for them whatever, could not hear without being moved to protest. As we advanced, his sallies and anecdotes grew more and more obscene, his conduct more insinuating. When he fell to hinting that I should, in return for his kindness, bring forward a few tales of a similar vintage, I professed myself sated with sight-seeing and, leading the way out into the sunshine to the stone terrace overlooking the Guadalquivir, with scanty excuse left him.

A walk across the stately old bridge and around the century-crumbled city walls lightened my spirits. In the afternoon, cutting short my siesta, I ventured back to the cathedral. The hour was well chosen; not another human being was within its walls. Unattended I entered the famous third mihrab and satisfied myself that its marble floor is really worn trough-like by the knees of pious Mohammedans, centuries since departed for whatever was in store for them in the realm of houris. Free from the prattle of "guides," I climbed an improvised ladder into the second mihrab, which was undergoing repairs; and for a full two hours wandered undisturbed in the pillared solitude.

Night had fallen when I set out on foot from Córdoba. The heat was too intense to have permitted sleep until towards morning, had I remained. Over the city behind, in the last glow of evening, there seemed to rise again the melancholy chant, ages dead, of the muezzin:

"Allah hû Allah! There is no God but God. Come to prayer. Allah ill Allah!"