Free Spain by Jan Morris Page B

itself but formidable beyond its scale, there stands the church: its arcade like a little market place, where you expect to see the merchants lounging, its apse like the rounded poop of an old ship, where the captain might be looking through his telescope, its reddish bulk squat and compact, its interior formal, cool, and massive. Finding this sophisticated structure there among its meadows (wistaria creeping up the priest’s house outside, flocks and pansies in the churchyard) is like knocking at the door of some sweet spinster’s cottage and finding it occupied by a mathematician of international authority—such is the force of the style, and such its quiet distinction.
    The Moors, too, were engineers of great skill, and there is nothing wishy-washy to the sacred buildings they erected in Spain: some in a pure Islamic kind; some in the style called Mozarabic, which was developed by Christians under Muslim rule; some in its reverse, Mudejar—Muslim and Christian Gothic mingling after the Reconquest. The interior of the Alhambra, that delicate symbol of Muslim decadence, looks more like a boudoir than a king’s headquarters, and a voluptuous excess seems to have characterized the vanished palace of Es-Zahrâ, outside Córdoba, which the Caliph Abder-Rahman III built for one of his favourites, and fitted out with several zoos and a bedroom pool of quicksilver. The mosques of Spain, however, were generally more virile memorials. We can still see, through a Christian overlay, the warlike simplicity of the great mosque at Córdoba, so near the desert in its tent-like forest of supporting pillars, so faithful to Mahomet’s tenets of cleanliness, abstinence, and regularity in its marching symmetry, its squareness, the fountains playing among the orange trees in its courtyard and the tall minaret that stands like a prod to the conscience above its gate.
    The massive pink tower of the Giralda above Seville Cathedral is one of the supreme monuments of Muslim engineering, comparable only to the minarets of Rabat and Marrakesh in Morocco (it used to be said that all three were built by the same architect, the brilliant Jebir; but unfortunately it has lately been demonstrated that there never was such a person). It is absolutely square, a gentle ramp takes you to the top of it, it is faced with glazed tiles, and at night-time, when the floodlights pick it out, big eagle-like birds, bleached by the light, sail and waver eerily around the angel on its summit.
    Such towers—some built as mosques, some as churches after the Reconquest—are to be found all over Spain, and many of the most haunting of them are in the north-east, where the hold of the Moors was relatively brief. This is because, during periods of intolerance in Muslim Spain, many Christian refugees fled northwards, taking with them the skill and tastes they had learnt from Islam. Thus one of the great surprises of Spain is the octagonal tower of San Pablo in Saragossa, obvious godson to a minaret, which is suddenly revealed in its slender brick splendour in one of the narrowest, scruffiest, and noisiest squares of the city. And of all the halfmoorish towns of Spain, perhaps the most evocative of Africa and Arabia is Calatayud, a day’s drive from France, in the heart of Aragón. It is partly the summer heat that makes it so, and the dust, and the emptiness of landscape; and partly the dun crumbled mountain that rises behind the town riddled with the burrows of troglodytes, crowned with the wreck of a fort, and looking as African as any Atlas or Mokattam; but it is chiefly the minarets that stand above the rooftops of the place, lording it over its cramped streets—spiky, slim, rather arrogant, and looking so bravely Muslim still that you can almost hear the click of the muezzin’s loudspeakers in the dawn, and see the white-robed figures hastening to their ablutions. Such buildings of infidel inspiration, left behind like a