Those who know the region in which these unhappy folk lived are aware of the material monuments which still exist and testify to the glorious past; and, seeing what they have seen, it is no great stretch of the imagination to picture to themselves the comfort, the elegance, and the luxury with which the inhabitants of Granada and Còrdoba lived surrounded. Over there, away across some few leagues of shining blue water, were the ruined homes of which many of the banished people still possessed the keys, awaiting the day when Allah and the Prophet should vouchsafe to them that return which they so naturally and ardently desired. To this day the key of the great Mosque at Cordoba is preserved at Rabat as a sacred relic of former dignity and power—a symbol to the Moslem of his perpetual banishment. If Cordoba with its mosque—still one of the wonders of the world, with its eleven hundred marble columns—were the principal shrine and holy of holies to these people, there were in addition hundreds of other temples of their faith now for ever desecrated in their eyes by the misfortune which had placed them in Christian hands. In Andalusia were the dishonoured graves of their kinsfolk, and, last and worst of all, in this land still dwelt thousands upon thousands of their co-religionists held in a degrading bondage by their implacable enemies. The capture of Algiers by Count Pedro Navarro was a crowning misfortune for the exiles, and when this commander seized upon the place he extracted from the inhabitants an oath of fidelity to the Spanish crown; he further erected a strong tower to overawe the town, and to keep its turbulent inhabitants in order. But such an oath as this, extracted at the point of the sword, was writ in water; it meant, of course, the suppression of piracy, and it also meant the starvation of most of those persons who dwelt in the vicinity. How the Moslem population existed for the six years after the incursion of Navarro is a mystery; but they probably moved their galleys, of which they possessed some twenty, further along the coast out of the range of the guns from Navarro’s Tower, and secure from the observation of those who held it for the Spanish king.