Yet a new element had arisen, which was destined to grow tragic. The Idea of Islam touched into new intensity the Ideas of Jew and Christian. Jew, Christian, Arab, settled down and married. But the three Ideas, grown virulent, did not marry. They made war. * * * * * Islam, meantime, moves from Andalusia north. And as it conquers Spain, the Catholic Reconquest which for near eight centuries holds Spain in blood is cradled in the tiny mountain kingdoms of Asturias and Aragon. Where the Moslem settles, the land becomes Moslem. Often it changes hands in the long war’s tides. But the people, like a tree, stays with its roots. Fresh Moslems may perhaps come to live in a province soon reconquered by the Christian. They will become Christian, too. It is one people. The struggle is between a Cross and a Crescent. And the hands which bear them are of a single body. Islam, battling in the desert north, has settled to peace in the south and fallen from the Idea of Islam. But battling in the desert north it takes its Idea along--its temper and its nature. And these, it gives unto the Christian foe! Rigorous desert traits flourish in Christian Aragon and Castile. For here is desert again, and violence as the matrix of the world. So the Christians of the north, facing Islam in battle, live ever closer to the Idea of Islam. War is an embrace fertile like love. Traits of Christian and Moslem pass in osmosis. And there comes the day when warlike Catholics from the north press on the gentled Mussulmans of the south with true Islamic rigor. And the Moslem south must look to Africa for Moslems close enough to the Idea of Islam to be able to withstand these northern Christians. And the war has no cease, being a war not of bloods but of souls. We are still in the first scenes of the play whose tragedy begins only when the clash of arms is over. Let us dwell awhile in Andalusia, first home of the Moslem and his last in Spain. _b._ _The Eye_ There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of space, measures infinitely deep. Córdoba is an eye within the face of Spain. But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew of ancient ash here and there speaking still in remnant eloquence of arch or Square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here: that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blind. Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there was today no Mosque, no subtle nerve of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if our sense were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us yet the Word of its incarnate knowledge. * * * * *