if they came back, would have no great trouble to reinstate themselves.
... The universal use of lime-wash gives a uniform tint to the
monuments, blunts the lines of the architecture, effaces the
ornamentation, and forbids you to read their age.... You cannot know
the wall of a century ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once the
center of Arab civilization, is now a huddle of little white houses with
corridors between them where two mules could hardly pass abreast. Life
seems to have ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the active
circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but the blanched
and calcined skeleton.... In spite of its Moslem air, Cordova is very
Christian and rests under the special protection of the Archangel
Raphael." It is all rather contradictory; but Gautier owns that the
great mosque is a "monument unique in the world, and novel even for
travelers who have had the fortune to admire the wonders of Moorish
architecture at Granada or Seville."

De Amicis, who visited Cordova nearly forty-five years later, and in the
heart of spring, brought letters which opened something of the intimate
life of that apparently blanched and calcined skeleton. He meets young
men and matches Italian verses with their Spanish; spends whole nights
sitting in their cafes or walking their plazas, and comes away with his
mouth full of the rapturous verses of an Arab poet: "Adieu, Cordova!
Would that my life were as long as Noah's, that I might live forever
within thy walls! Would that I had the treasures of Pharaoh, to spend
them upon wine and the beautiful women of Cordova, with tho gentle
eyes that invite kisses!" He allows that the lines may be "a little too
tropical for the taste of a European," and it seems to me that there may
be a golden mean between scolding and flattering which would give the
truth about Cordova. I do not promise to strike it; our hotel still
rankles in my heart; but I promise to try for it, though I have to say
that the very moment we started for the famous mosque it began to rain,
and rained throughout the forenoon, while we weltered from wonder to
wonder through the town. We were indeed weltering in a closed carriage,
which found its way not so badly through the alleys where two mules
could not pass abreast. The lime-wash of the walls did not emit the
white heat in which the other tourists have basked or baked; the houses
looked wet and chill, and if they had those flowered and fo