The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

We are now coming down into the region of the aloe, the olive, the orange, and the vine. Since we have crossed the Sierra Morena, the climate has softened. At this season of the year (February), the vegetation is not far advanced, but the leaves of the olive are always green, and the orange and the lemon bear leaves and fruit and flowers at the same time. The orange should, in some climates, like this and the south of France, remain on the tree, after it appears to be ripe, for two years, before it is sweet. Much of that delicious fruit which we have in our country is too sour to be good, because gathered and sent to market before it is fully ripe. Here, and all over the southern parts of Spain, it is a glorious fruit. It is very large, very yellow, and very sweet; and being abundant, is very cheap. A cent of our money will buy the largest, and the natives get them much cheaper than that. Sweet lemons are also common. But they are not agreeable. They seem to me a miserable attempt to be an orange. And the good sour lemons grow to an enormous size. I got one in Cordova to measure, and my hat would hold one lemon only! The skin was at least an inch thick; the juice not so acid as of the lemon generally, and there was no more of it than in one of ordinary size. These large lemons are used in preserves, the skin being the only available part of the fruit.

We are now on the plains, in sight of the graceful hills of Andalusia. In the soft sunlight of this warm winter’s day the hills appear to be sleeping and enjoying their repose. All nature, even now, invites to rest. We begin to feel the languor of the clime. There are no trees but the olive. No birds are singing, or we should know that summer is nigh. We stop frequently at little stations, to leave and take the mail. The letters and papers are tied up in a packet with a string, and are handed from the mail-car to a boy or a woman on hand to receive them. The letters from the place are delivered to the mail-agent in the same way. No bag, no box, no lock or key, not even a wrapper around the letters protects them. It is the way they do things in this country.

Over these wide plains there are few or no habitations to be seen. The peasants must travel many miles to their daily work, for they live in villages far away from the lands they till. Few cattle are to be seen; now and then a flock of sheep. More black sheep than white ones were in sight, and many of the blacks were singularly marked, having but one white spot on them, and that at the tip of their tails.

CORDOVA.

CHAPTER VIII.
CORDOVA.

A NEW, but old world, a sudden vision of the Orient, rose on the sight, when we reached the city of Cordova. Never did I enter a city that filled me with a deeper sense of the transient, temporal, and fleeting nature of all things material. It is not in ruins. It shows no tokens of decay to the coming traveller. A cleaner city is not in the world. It was the first city in Europe whose streets were paved, and the traditional habits of the people are so well preserved, that although it was a thousand years ago (in 850, under Abdurhaman) that this work was done, it has been done again and again, and the stones in the streets are kept as clean as the floor of a house. The Guadalquiver flows gently by the side of it, and under the shade-trees planted on its banks the idle and the fashionable have their favorite lounge and promenade. The bridge over this widely famed river was first built by Octavius Cæsar and rebuilt by the Moors. Standing on sixteen arches, it is a striking monument of two departed dynasties and forms of civilization. The city itself was great before Christ came into the world, and Julius Cæsar writes of it as it was in his day, when his armies swept over Spain. In the civil wars of Rome, Cordova declared for Pompey, and then Cæsar put 28,000 of its inhabitants to the sword.

After the Moors came over from Africa, and, in the battle of Guadalete, struck down the power of the Goths, this city was governed by the Caliph of Damascus, until it became independent and the capital of Moorish Spain. Then began its career of glory. In the tenth century it had 300,000 inhabitants (now 40,000), and for these devout and cleanly and hospitable and learned Mussulmans there were six hundred mosques, and nine hundred baths, and six hundred inns, and eight hundred schools, and a library of 600,000 volumes.

Outside of the city the people had gone in crowds to a rural fête. Men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor, on foot, on horse, on mules or donkeys, and in carriages,—any way to go,—all had gone to have a jolly time in the country, as the custom is in Spain. It was a gay sight, but rising among the grounds were scattered here and there the remnants of ancient buildings, broken columns, fragments of capitals, and blocks of stone, that lay there silently speaking of departed glory. For here once stood the fairy palace of the Moorish Abdurhama, which that prince built for his favorite sultana, whose name it bore, and whose statue stood above the principal gate. The whole palace was of marbles and precious stones, adorned with the florid architecture which the genius of the East would invent. More than four thousand marble columns did this luxurious monarch bring from France and Italy and Africa to adorn his halls. And when he had spent more than fifty millions of pounds sterling upon it, he brought into his harem four thousand and three hundred women! Guarded by twelve thousand valiant men, he gave himself up to the pleasures of “the life that now is.” The city of Cordova was the city for such a king!

It is Moorish, Oriental, languid, voluptuous, in its decay. Walking along its quiet, almost noiseless streets, we looked in upon the courts that form the central patio around the four sides of which the house is built. In the midst, a fountain springs, and the water falls back into a marble basin. Around it shrubs with blooming flowers fill the air with fragrance and beauty. In some of them evergreen trees, of unknown age, are growing, and these have been trained so curiously, as to produce surprising effects. Planted at the four corners of a square, their tops are brought over to meet each other, the branches are joined, the redundant leaves and twigs being pruned away, they grow together, the whole four, like one tree of arch over arch, a perpetually verdant bower. The windows of the dwelling look down into this court; and in them, or on its marble pavements in the heat of the day, the women sit with their needle-work, enjoying the fragrant shade and the music of the falling water. The gardens abound in oranges, lemons, and limes, hanging over the walls in clusters of extraordinary size.