t wore slowly away, and while the _mozo_ drowsed on his post, I caught
snatches of sleep between his cries. As the landscape began to grow
distinct in the gray, cloudy dawn, we saw before us Cordova, with the dark
range of the Sierra Morena rising behind it. This city, once the glory of
Moorish Spain, the capital of the great Abd-er-Rahman, containing, when in
its prime, a million of inhabitants, is now a melancholy wreck. It has not
a shadow of the art, science, and taste which then distinguished it, and
the only interest it now possesses is from these associations, and the
despoiled remnant of its renowned Mosque.

We crossed the Guadalquivir on a fine bridge built on Roman foundations,
and drove slowly down the one long, rough, crooked street. The diligence
stops for an hour, to allow passengers to breakfast, but my first thought
was for the Cathedral-mosque, _la Mezquita_, as it is still called. "It is
closed," said the ragged crowd that congregated about us; "you cannot get
in until eight o'clock." But I remembered that a silver key will open
anything in Spain, and taking a mozo as a guide we hurried off as fast as
the rough pavements would permit. We had to retrace the whole length of
the city, but on reaching the Cathedral, found it open. The exterior is
low, and quite plain, though of great extent. A Moorish gateway admitted
me into the original court-yard, or _haram_, of the mosque, which is
planted with orange trees and contains the fountain, for the ablutions of
Moslem worshippers, in the centre. The area of the Mosque proper,
exclusive of the court-yard, is about 400 by 350 feet. It was built on the
plan of the great Mosque of Damascus, about the end of the eighth century.
The materials--including twelve hundred columns of marble, jasper and
porphyry, from the ruins of Carthage, and the temples of Asia
Minor---belonged to a Christian basilica, of the Gothic domination, which
was built upon the foundations of a Roman temple of Janus; so that the
three great creeds of the world have here at different times had their
seat. The Moors considered this mosque as second in holiness to the Kaaba
of Mecca, and made pilgrimages to it from all parts of Moslem Spain and
Barbary. Even now, although shorn of much of its glory, it surpasses any
Oriental mosque into which I have penetrated, except St. Sophia, which is
a Christian edifice.

All the nineteen original entrances--beautiful horse-shoe arches--are
closed, except t