Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

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Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain, the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon. Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands which bear them are of a single body.

Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it takes its Idea along—its temper and its nature. And these, it gives unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle, live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease, being a war not of bloods but of souls.

We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first home of the Moslem and his last in Spain.

b. The Eye

There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of Spain.

But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here: that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind. Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the Word of its incarnate knowledge.

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The Mosque is open to a patio with orange trees, palms, fountains whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval Puerta del Perdón the Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself. Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest.

Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and shoulders—marshaled like an army—move with the undulance of earth to the Mihrab of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns.