The chroniclers relate wonders of the palace of An Naôra, so called from its celebrated _noria_ or hydraulic apparatus. The apartments were so splendid as to rival those of the palace of the Amir himself, and “were resplendent as the sun at noonday, and the moon at the full.” In the luxurious gardens was the lake or albuhera, in the centre of which rose a pavilion of glass, where Al Ramân-bil-Lah, the last sovereign of Toledo, used to pass the night. “The clever architects”--we quote from the “Monumentos Arquitectónicos”--who made the lake, not only raised the waters from the river in order to fill it, but raised them above the cupola of the pavilion, over and around which they flowed incessantly, forming around it a diaphanous and crystalline mantle. Not a drop could penetrate the structure or touch the persons within. With the sonorous murmur of these waters mingled that produced by the fountains that gushed forth from the mouths of the lions in metal guarding this wonderful pavilion. Illumined inside with lamps of various colours, without it presented a fantastic appearance, which was reflected back from the waters of the lake, and which the people of Toledo contemplated with admiration through the dense foliage.” Of this exquisite pleasaunce, no trace remains. Nor is anything left of the other palace of Al Hizem, built by Ismaîl, the first admittedly independent Sultan of Toledo--afterwards inhabited by the Christian kings. The principal building in Moorish times was, of course, the Aljama, or Chief Mosque. This seems to have been erected at the same time as the great Mezquita at Cordoba, in the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman II., and to have been richly embellished and enlarged under the third and greatest Khalifa of that name. We read that in the fourth century of the Hegira, the architect Fatho ben Ibrahim el Caxevi built two sumptuous mosques, called, the one, Adabejin, the other Gebel Berida; but where these were situated, or what was the real Arabic spelling of the names, we have no means of knowing. Happily a few specimens of the local architecture of that epoch remain. Of these one of the learned compilers of the “Monumentos Arquitectónicos” writes: “In spite of their varying degrees of integrity, and although greatly damaged and changed by later restorations, these works possess an extreme importance, and suffice to manifest the peculiar physiognomy of the secondary religious edifices of this part of the Peninsula at the most glorious epoch of the Khalifate--a physiognomy strikingly different from that of the principal religious structures, or Aljamas, equivalent to our cathedrals, and different also from that of the same buildings in the south. They show, furthermore, decorative processes believed to have been unknown in Spain at that epoch.”