saics, its 1293
clustered columns, inlaid with gold and lapis-lazuli, the clusters
reaching up to the slender arches which supported the roof; the whole
of this marvelous scene lighted by countless brazen lamps made from
Christian bells, while hundreds of attendants swung censers, filling
the air with perfume.

After the ravages of a thousand years travelers stand amazed to-day
before the forest of columns which open out in endless vistas in the
splendid ruin, calling up visions of the vanished glories of Cordova
and the Great Khalif.

There is not time to tell of the city this Spanish Khalif built for
his favorite wife, "The Fairest," and which he called "Hill of the
Bride," upon which for fifteen years ten thousand men worked daily;
nor of the four thousand columns which adorned its palaces, presents
from emperors and potentates in Constantinople, Rome, and far-off
Eastern states; nor of the ivory and ebony doors, studded with jewels,
through which shone the sun, the light then falling on the lake of
quick-silver, which sent back blinding, quivering flashes into dazzled
eyes. And we are told of the thirteen thousand male servants who
ministered in this palace of delight. All this, too, at a time when
our Saxon ancestors were living in dwellings without chimneys, and
casting the bones from the table at which they feasted into the foul
straw which covered their floors; when a Gothic night had settled upon
Europe, and blotted out civilization so completely that only in a part
of Italy, and around Constantinople, did there remain a vestige of
refinement!

It is said that when the embassy from Constantinople came bearing a
letter to the Khalif, the courtier whose duty it was to read it was so
awed by all this splendor that he fainted!

And yet the owner and creator of this fabulous luxury,--Sultan and
Khalif of a dominion the greatest of his time, and with "The Fairest"
for his adored wife,--when he came to die, left a paper upon which he
had written that he could only recall fourteen days in which he had
been happy.

[Footnote A: See "Quo Vadis?"]

CHAPTER XIII.

In the north there was developing another and very different power.
The descendants of the Visigoth Kings, making common cause with the
rough mountaineers, had shared all their hardships and rigors in the
mountains of the Asturias. Inured to privation and suffering, entirely
unacquainted with luxury or even with the comforts of living, they had