“Do you care about shooting?” I asked. The Don never walked a step, if he could avoid it, and got up at two in the afternoon. I could not think of him in the light of a sportsman.
“It is the preferred sport of all Spanishes men as of the English,” he answered. “The ladies like the coontry very mooch; some of them kill the game. We have large fires of great tree troonks, no small pieces of woods like in the city. In the evening it is very sociable; we gather at one house or another; there is singing and dancing. Ah, yes, the most pleasant life is in the coontry. If the guests come far, they spend the night. It is all so simply, no like England. One large room for all the ladies; one for all the gentlemen.”
I asked the Don if they stayed in their country places in summer.
“No, in the spring they return to Cordoba. The hot is very strong; here the houses is prepared for the hot. All people sit out in the court. In soomer, they go to take another climate. The Sierra is not good for the health, it is very humid.”
“He was telling me last night,” said Patsy, “about the time Queen Isabel II came to Cordova. He was only a boy then, but his father was at a banquet the Marquis de Benemeji gave for her at Quita Pesares—Away Cares; isn’t that a good name for a garden? The old gentleman must have plied a better knife and fork than the Don, for Jaime remembers to this day the way his father rolled up his eyes when he told them about the good things they had to eat. Aroz a la Valenciana—baked rice with fish, quails, green peas and artichokes; saddle of veal larded and roasted with aromatic herbs and manzanilla, rice boiled in cream with the name of the best guest at each table traced in powdered cinnamon, natilla, a wonderful kind of cream, and ojaldres,—a sort of pastry, light and brittle as a butterfly’s wing, which they eat with chocolate. When they had eaten and drunk all that they could, the Queen said good-bye and started to go. What do you suppose she found at the door? A brand new coach, Andalusian style, with eight splendid caballos antigrados (Cordovan horses with yellow skins marked like tigers) harnessed Andalusian fashion, with silver bells and silken tags. The Queen hopped into the coach and drove away. She took it back to Madrid, where, the Don thinks, we can see it still in the royal stables. He says Cordova has traditions to live up to.
“When the Queen’s son, Alfonzo XII, came here, the days of coaches were gone by. The Grandee at whose house the King stayed had the railroad tracks laid through the streets to his door, so that the King should not have the trouble of driving from the station to the house.”
“Speaking of railroads,” said J. “I think I’ve had enough of Cordova.”
“So have I, this season,” Patsy agreed. “Next year, when I make the tour of all the ferias of Spain, with my friend the Mountebank, I shall come back to Cordova and enter the Contest of Poets.”
From that moment till we left, I spent every waking hour in the Mosque, the thing best worth seeing in Cordova. Outside, it looks more like a fortress than a sanctuary. It has battlements, towers and buttresses quite in character with the militant Mahommedan religion, and hopelessly out of character with the Christian. It is grim, forbidding, and tremendously impressive all at once! The gates, the gates alone, give a hint of the beauty inside! The light, interlaced, horseshoe arches resting on slender columns, and the rich mosaic over the Puerta Arabe are like a foretaste of a feast. In the splendid court of Oranges, where the trees are planted in long aisles (they originally were a continuation of the aisles of the Mosque), there are five fountains, and fifty beggars and guides. As we were making a bargain with the youngest guide to keep the others at bay, the Argentino came up and offered his services in the place of a guide.
“I have had them all,” he said; “and picked their brains like a corbie.”