very
hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and scholars were
what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to have become, with a
primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond the learning of all other
Europe in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters of religion;
polite agnostics, who disliked extremely the passion of some Christians
dwelling among them for getting themselves put to death, as they did,
for insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people
of culture in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman's mind in wishing
to substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the
medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have had
their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was completed. If
they recognized it as a concession to the general preference, they could
do so without the discomfort which they must have suffered when some new
horde of Berbers, full of faith and fight, came over from Africa to push
back the encroaching Spanish frontier, and give the local Christians as
much martyrdom as they wanted.

It is all a conjecture based upon material witness no more substantial
than that which the Latin domination left long centuries before the
Arabs came to possess the land. The mosque from which you drive through
the rain to the river is neither newer nor older looking than the
beautiful Saracenic bridge over the Guadalquivir which the Arabs
themselves say was first built by the Romans in the time of Augustus;
the Moorish mill by the thither shore might have ground the first wheat
grown in Europe. It is intensely, immemorially African, flat-roofed,
white-walled; the mules waiting outside in the wet might have been
drooping there ever since the going down of the Flood, from which the
river could have got its muddy yellow.

If the reader will be advised by me he will not go to the Archaeological
Museum, unless he wishes particularly to contribute to the support of
the custodian; the collection will not repay him even for the time in
which a whole day of Cordova will seem so superabundant. Any little
street will be worthier his study, with its type of passing girls in
white and black mantillas, and its shallow shops of all sorts, their
fronts thrown open, and their interiors flung, as it were, on the
sidewalk. It is said that the streets were the first to be paved in
Europe, and they have apparently not been repaved since 850. This indeed
will not Ho