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Updated: June 11, 2025
I felt as must have felt the first aviator who flew unheralded over an oriental city, with its patios and house-roofs spread naked beneath him. It was on one of the early days of observation that an astounding thought came to me before I had lost perspective in intensive watching, before familiarity had assuaged some of the marvel of these super-tadpoles.
I gave up the point, but proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was met with a new mortification. Of all patios they declared that mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound.
But one who would not press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by finding some of the patios too new-looking, with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the winter.
Hopie and I took an exploring walk as far as the Plaza and Church of San Lorenzo, stopping now and then to peep into the cool patios filled with flowers, and a murmuring fountain often in the middle, which you see through the corridor, sometimes with a door of iron trellis, sometimes open.
On our way home we had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open patios.
Instead, he wandered through the silent rooms, across the patios, and along the dim-lit halls. His frame of mind was as of one about to depart on a journey. He pressed on the lights in Paula's fairy patio, and, sitting in an austere Roman seat of marble, smoked a cigarette quite through while he made his plans. Oh, he would do it nicely enough.
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, water-sellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
These Moorish buildings have their rooms built around open courtyards, called patios, where orange and lemon trees and many bright flowers grow, and fountains splash in the sunshine. The rooms have many pillars to support the ceiling, and all the pillars and arches and ceilings are beautifully carved.
There was a light-hearted groom in one of the patios of our flat, in the Calle Lope de Vega, who would continue almost without a break the whole day.
One is told that in cities like Fez and Marrakech the Hebrew quarter conceals flowery patios and gilded rooms with the heavy European furniture that rich Jews delight in.
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