You may return to the city through the transpontine quarter of Triana, a collection of whitewashed houses inhabited chiefly by gipsies. To distinguish these no longer nomadic Bohemians from the lower-class Andalusians around them is not an easy task. As at Granada, gipsy dances are got up by the guides and hotel people, and here, I am told, they possess the merit which a Frenchman denies to those of the other city--impropriety. The patron saints of Seville, Saints Justa and Rufina, were potters in this quarter. In their time the Carthaginian goddess, Astarte or Salambo, was much venerated in the Roman city. The commemoration of the death of Adonis took place in the month of July, when the image of the goddess was borne in triumph through the streets, while the people following with cries and lamentations deplored the untimely end of her beloved. A strange survival, this, on soil so far to the west, of the hideous Punic rites! The two maidens, newly converted to the religion of the Crucified, refused to do reverence to the image as it was carried past, and were haled before the governor, Diogenianus, in his palace by the Cordova Gate. They were put to death in due course, and have received more honour since from architects, sculptors, and painters, than Venus-Astarte in all her glory received from her devotees. [Illustration: CORDOVA--A COURTYARD] Before leaving Triana, visit the Church of Santa Ana, to see the exquisite Madonna of Alejo Fernandez, whom Lord Leighton considered the most conspicuous among the Gothic painters. There is a regard for beauty in the figures, not by any means obtrusive in most of the paintings of the period, though the awkward pose of some of the angels shows that the artist had not quite emancipated himself from Byzantine influence. And the thought occurred to me as I made my way back to the Delicias Gardens, where the people were driving out to take the air, and knots were collecting round musicians and mountebanks--when the whole city was yielding itself up to the sensuous charm of the summer night--that the art of Fernandez was expressive of Seville: of a people in whom the sense of beauty and the joy of living cannot be extinguished, though at the call of religion they reluctantly keep their faces half turned towards sad facts and yet more sombre unrealities. CHAPTER III CORDOVA "They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep."