The Mosque is open to a _patio_ with orange trees, palms, fountains whose pallid water runs in counterpoint with the fervor of mosaic and tile. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl sings quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes diverge from the hard hot day. On the medieval _Puerta del Perdón_ the Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem mass of the Mosque. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself. Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest. Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling which once was a maze of lace-like wood, inlaid. The movement of the columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of porphyry, merge in the sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in cohorts between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Arabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the inæsthesia of Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken the spirit of the Mosque. The dance of the pillars moves toward this obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with their double-arched head-dress, with their fleet ankles and shoulders--marshaled like an army--move with the undulance of earth to the _Mihrab_ of Abd-er-Rahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure of prayer. Before it sits the Master to direct discourse with Allah. The Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of the columns. Individual vibrancies of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail as sea-shells, fuse into fixity. The Mihrab is the goal of the columns. So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the _Mesjid al-Jâmi_, open to the fountains and the _naranjeros_, open to the skies. It is a place whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.