hands as lightly as a filigree casket. The architects who restored it
about twenty years ago fortunately refrained from all attempts at
improving or renovating its sunburned, wind-swept surface.

The Giralda is as strong as it looks. The huge walls have a thickness of
eight feet below, diminishing to seven feet in the upper stories. The
height to the very top of the crowning figure is 308 feet. In the
foundations are bricks, rubble, and huge blocks of earlier Roman and
Visigothic masonry; even Latin inscriptions are found immured. The
Moors, like all other builders, used the materials readiest at hand;
the rejected building stones of one generation become the corner stones
of the next.

Below the Renaissance addition with which the tower was terminated in
1568, the broad sides of the shaft had been broken by the Arabs in the
simplest and most felicitous manner. The brickwork was treated in three
panels with the corner borders very properly broader and stronger than
the two intermediate ones. The panels, which could not be of a happier
depth, are filled down to eighty feet of the ground with varying Moorish
arabesque patterns; the figured diaper-work on all sides is broken in
the two outer panels by blind cusped arches, and in the central
patterns, by Moorish windows of the "ajuiez" variety. Their double
arches are subdivided by small Byzantine columns; these again are framed
within larger cusped and differently broken horseshoe curves. Small
Renaissance balconies have at a later date been placed below the
windows. The small niches comprising the total Moorish composition
sparkle throughout with life and charm, and, though no two are alike,
they form a harmonious whole. The Arab seemed to have an instinctive
aversion from tedious repetition. He would always vary the design just
enough to satisfy his imagination and creative faculty, but never
sufficiently to disturb the harmony of the general scheme. As with the
windows, so also with the arabesques. They begin at slightly varying
heights on the different sides of the tower, so that the windows may
properly meet the different elevations of the interior stair. Their
patterns are not quite the same, neither on the various sides of the
tower nor at different heights on the same side. The decoration
employed is admirably fitted to a large surface which would have been
weakened by strong cutting or deep relief. Considering what Arab art
achieved within prescribed limits, th