exterior is low, and quite plain, though of great extent.  A Moorish gateway admitted me into the original court-yard, or haram, of the mosque, which is planted with orange trees and contains the fountain, for the ablutions of Moslem worshippers, in the centre.  The area of the Mosque proper, exclusive of the court-yard, is about 400 by 350 feet.  It was built on the plan of the great Mosque of Damascus, about the end of the eighth century.  The materials—­including twelve hundred columns of marble, jasper and porphyry, from the ruins of Carthage, and the temples of Asia Minor—–­belonged to a Christian basilica, of the Gothic domination, which was built upon the foundations of a Roman temple of Janus; so that the three great creeds of the world have here at different times had their seat.  The Moors considered this mosque as second in holiness to the Kaaba of Mecca, and made pilgrimages to it from all parts of Moslem Spain and Barbary.  Even now, although shorn of much of its glory, it surpasses any Oriental mosque into which I have penetrated, except St. Sophia, which is a Christian edifice.

All the nineteen original entrances—­beautiful horse-shoe arches—­are closed, except the central one.  I entered by a low door, in one corner of the corridor.  A wilderness of columns connected by double arches (one springing above the other, with an opening between), spread their dusky aisles before me in the morning twilight.  The eight hundred and fifty shafts of this marble forest formed labyrinths and mazes, which at that early hour appeared boundless, for their long vistas disappeared in the shadows.  Lamps were burning before distant shrines, and a few worshippers were kneeling silently here and there.  The sound of my own footsteps, as I wandered through the ranks of pillars, was all that I heard.  In the centre of the wood (for such it seemed) rises the choir, a gaudy and tasteless excrescence added by the Christians.  Even Charles V., who laid a merciless hand on the Alhambra, reproved the Bishop of Cordova for this barbarous and unnecessary disfigurement.

The sacristan lighted lamps in order to show me the Moorish chapels.  Nothing but the precious materials of which these exquisite structures are composed could have saved them from the holy hands of the Inquisition, which intentionally destroyed all the Roman antiquities of Cordova.  Here the fringed arches, the lace-like filigrees, the wreathed inscriptions, and the domes of pendent stalactites which enchant you in the Alcazar of Seville, are repeated, not in stucco, but in purest marble, while the entrance to the “holy of holies” is probably the most glorious piece of mosaic in the world.  The pavement of the interior is deeply worn by the knees of the Moslem pilgrims, who compassed it seven times, kneeling, as they now do in the Kaaba, at Mecca.  The sides are embroidered with sentences from the Koran, in Cufic characters, and the roof is in the form of a fluted shell, of a single piece of