o inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that
hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of henhouse which
pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for calcimining the rooms on
the _patio._

By the time we returned we found a guide waiting for us, and we agreed
with him for a day's service. He did not differ with other authorities
as to the claims of Cordova on the tourist's interest. From being the
most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of the Caliphs
it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books and most of the
travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial towns. It is no longer
the center of learning; and though it cannot help doing a large business
in olives, with the orchards covering the hills around it, the business
does not seem to be a very active one. "The city once the abode of
the flower of Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent O'Shea in
his _Guide to Spain, "_is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the
absentee senorio; their 'solares' are desert and wretched, the streets
ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and
denuded of all art and meaning, either past or present." Baedeker gives
like reasons for thinking "the traveler whose expectation is on
tiptoe as he enters the ancient capital of the Moors will probably be
disappointed in all but the cathedral." _Cook's Guide,_ latest but not
least commendable of the authorities, is of a more divided mind and
finds the means of trade and industry and their total want of visible
employment at the worst anomalous.

[Illustration: 19 THE ANCIENT CITY OF CORDOVA]

Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only
an endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers or
sellers to speak of, and a tangle of squat white houses, abounding in
lovely _patios,_ sweet and bright with flowers and fountains: this
seems to be Cordova in the consensus of the manuals, and with me in
the retrospect a sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead
capital of the Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years ago
he thought (and there has not been much change since), that "Cordova has
a more African look than any other city of Andalusia; its streets, or
rather its lanes, whose tumultuous pavement resembles the bed of dry
torrents, all littered with straw from the loads of passing donkeys,
have nothing that recalls the manners and customs of Europe. The Moors,