vantage of secluding
themselves. To-day a woman who loves will do that unprompted.

In the suggestion of the Moors there was nothing emphatic. Usually girls
of position saw, to the day of their marriage, but relatives and womenfolk
whom the husband and his friends then routed with daggers of gold. But
access to Chain-of-Hearts was not otherwise always impossible. In default
of gold daggers there were silk ladders let down from high windows and up
which one might climb. In the local tales of love and chivalry, in the
story, for instance, of _Medjnoun and Leilah_, in that of the _Dovazdeh
Rokh_--the Twelve Knights--many such ladders and windows appear, many are
the kisses, multiple are the furtive delights. Apart from them history has
frequent mention of Andalusian Sapphos, free, fervid, poetic, charming the
leisures of caliphs, or, after an exacter pattern of the Lesbian,
instructing other girls in what were called the keys of felicities--the
_divans_ of the poets, the art and theory of verse; more austerely still,
in mathematics and law.[52]

To please young women of that distinction, a man had to be something more
than a caliph, something else than violently brave. Necessarily he had to
be expert in fantasias with arms and horse, but he had to be also
discreet; in addition he had to be able to contend and successfully in the
moufakhara, or tournaments of song--struggles of glory that proceeded
directly from Mekke where the verses of the victors were affixed with gold
nails to the doors of the Mosque. From these tournaments all modern poetry
proceeds. Acclimatized, naturalized and embellished in Andalusia, they
were imitated there by the encroaching Castilians who proudly but falsely
called themselves _los primeros padres de la poesia vulgar_.

At that time, the Provencal tongue, called the Limosin or Langue d'oc, was
spoken not only throughout the meridional provinces of France but
generally in Christian Spain.[53] Whatever was common to Spanish poetry
was common to that of Provence: both drank from the same source, the
overflowing cup of the Moors. The original form of each is that employed
in the _divans_ of the latter. There is in them also the tell-tale novelty
rhyme which, unknown to Greece and Rome, lower Latinity had not achieved.
In addition the Provencal and Spanish tensons, or contentions of song,
are but replicas of the moufakhara, or struggles of glory, while the
minstrel going up and down the Great River