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Updated: June 11, 2025
We ourselves were so interested in the event that we took part in it so far as to push aside a bench that blocked the way, and we received a grateful smile from the monk in reward of our zeal. We were in the mood for simple kindness because of our stiff official reception at the Royal Palace, which we visited in the gratification of our passion for patios.
The patios of the better class of houses are ornamented with flowering plants, and pets of all sorts, especially birds, are numerous, the favorite species being the mocking-bird. One patio we noticed full to repletion of tame pigeons, blue, black, white, and mottled fantails.
Whenever I enter these beautiful marble patios, set out with shrubs and flowers, refreshed by fountains, sheltered with awnings from the sun; where the air is cool at noonday, the ear delighted in sultry summer by the sound of falling water; where, in a word, a little paradise is shut up within the walls of home, I think on the poor Moors, the inventors of all these delights.
Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
They had decidedly prettier patios and more of them, and they had many public carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital.
There is no portion of the city set aside for the rich or the poor. People of means, of education, and of refinement live in the upper stories. The poor live in crowded rooms and patios, and in basements or in dirty alleys. Many of the wealthy, fashionable people live in the pretty suburban towns. Others, who are engaged in business in the cities, live over their stores, on the second floor.
And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let us run our eyes around that Moorish square.
Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only an endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers or sellers to speak of, and a tangle of squat white houses, abounding in lovely patios, sweet and bright with flowers and fountains: this seems to be Cordova in the consensus of the manuals, and with me in the retrospect a sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead capital of the Western Caliphs.
This is a Spanish custom, which is observable in Havana and continental Spain, as well as in all the cities of Mexico. Other patios, whose occupants do not keep private vehicles, adorn these areas with charming plants, small tropical trees, blooming flowers, statuary, and fountains.
It was a place of brilliant sunshine and purple shadows, of gray walls over which peacocks hung their tails, of mysterious stairways, and latticed windows behind which ladies sat peering through their embroidered face screens resembling semicircular candle shades; and there was always a marvelous clamor in the streets, and silence in the patios full of flowers.
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