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.
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