“The exterior of Moorish edifices in general was plain and forbidding; the object was to keep out heat and enemies, foreign and domestic, and to keep in women and to disarm the evil eye--the great bugbear of antiquity, the East, Andalusia, and Naples. The interior, all light, air, colour, and luxury, glittered like a spar enclosed in a rough pebble, and the door once opened, ushered the Moor into a houri-peopled palace which realised those gorgeous descriptions that seem to our good folks, who live in bricks and mortar, to be the fictions of oriental poetry, or the fabric of Aladdin’s genii; yet such were the palatial fortresses--the Abazares, the Alhambras of the Spanish Moors; and such, on a minor scale, were their private dwellings, many of which still exist in Seville, though dimmed by ages and neglect. The generic features are, a court hidden from public gaze, but open to the blue sky, and surrounded with horse-shoe-arched corridors, which rest on palm-like pillars of marble, whose spandrils are pierced in gossamer lace-work; in the centre plays a fountain, gladdening the air with freshness, the ear with music, the eye with dropping diamonds. On the walls around, was lavished a surface of mosaic decoration, richer than shawls of cashmere, wrought in porcelain and delicate plaster, and painted with variegated tints; above hung a roof of Phœnician-like carpentry, gilded and starred as a heaven; while the doors and windows admitted vistas of gardens of myrtles, roses, oranges, and pomegranates, where fruit mingled with flower and colour vied with fragrance.” FOOTNOTES: [241] There is in Meyrick’s collection an old Highland sword with the same guard. [242] “The first consuls of Rome, L. V. Publicola and L. Brutus, as also the brother of the latter, had in their patents for the few lands granted them, the distinction of having their gates to open outward instead of inward.”--Pliny, l. xxxvi. c. 15. [243] It is the three-fourths of a circle with a Job at each extremity, and a moveable tongue lying upon it. The necklaces do not pass round the neck, but are worn in front, only each end being fastened to the brooch. With this coincides the description in Exodus of Aaron’s ephod in c. xxviii. and xxxix. The two onyx stones engraved with the names of the tribes were to be borne upon the two shoulders, and there were to be two ouches of gold to fasten the stones, from which a chain should depend, fastened to the breastplate. [244] The houses here are better than any in Morocco, and look like casts in plaster, being built piece by piece in moulds.--DAVIDSON’S Journal in Fez, p. 86. [245] The Carthaginians hang drapery on their walls. In the Peninsula, for ceremonies, the streets are sometimes entirely lined with drapery, and the interior of the churches in Spain have drapery fitted for them like clothes. The cathedral of Seville may be seen in Holy Week undergoing changes like the decorations of a theatre. BOOK III. THE ARAB TENT.