VI


At the mosque the _patio_ was not taken in only because it was so large,
but I find by our records that it was much molested by a beggar who
followed us when we dismounted at the gate of the Court of Oranges, and
all but took our minds off the famous Moorish fountain in the midst. It
was not a fountain of the plashing or gushing sort, but a noble great
pool in a marble basin. The women who clustered about it were not
laughing and chattering, or singing, or even dancing, in the right
Andalusian fashion, but stood silent in statuesque poses from which they
seemed in no haste to stir for filling their water jars and jugs. The
Moorish tradition of irrigation confronting one in all the travels and
histories as a supreme agricultural advantage which the Arabs took back
to Africa with them, leaving Spain to thirst and fry, lingers here in
the circles sunk round the orange trees and fed by little channels. The
trees grew about as the fancy took them, and did not mind the
incongruous palms towering as irregularly above them. While we wandered
toward the mosque a woman robed in white cotton, with a lavender scarf
crossing her breast, came in as irrelevantly as the orange trees and
stood as stably as the palms; in her night-black hair she alone in
Cordova redeemed the pledge of beauty made for all Andalusian women by
the reckless poets and romancers, whether in ballads or books of travel.

One enters the court by a gate in a richly yellow tower, with a shrine
to St. Michael over the door, and still higher at the lodging of the
keeper a bed of bright flowers. Then, however, one is confronted with
the first great disappointment in the mosque. Shall it be whispered in