We came away from Cordova with a pretty good conscience as to its
sights. Upon the whole we were glad they were so few, when once we had
made up our minds about the mosque. But now I have found too late that
we ought to have visited the general market in the old square where the
tournaments used to take place; we ought to have seen also the Chapel
of the Hospital del Cardenal, because it was part of the mosque of
Al-Manssour; we ought to have verified the remains of two baths out of
the nine hundred once existing in the Calle del Bagno Alta; and we ought
finally to have visited the remnant of a Moorish house in the Plazuela
de San Nicolas, with its gallery of jasper columns, now unhappily
whitewashed. The Campo Santo has an unsatisfied claim upon my interest
because it was the place where the perfervid Christian zealots used to
find the martyrdom they sought at the hands of the unwilling Arabs; and
where, far earlier, Julius Caesar planted a plane tree after his victory
over the forces of Pompeii at Munda. The tree no longer exists, but
neither does Caesar, or the thirty thousand enemies whom he slew there,
or the sons of Pompeii who commanded them. These were so near beating
Casar at first that he ran among his soldiers “asking them whether they
were not ashamed to deliver him into the hands of boys.” One of the boys
escaped, but two days after the fight the head of the elder was brought
to Caesar, who was not liked for the triumph he made himself after the
event in Rome, where it was thought out of taste to rejoice over the
calamity of his fellow-countrymen as if they had been foreign foes;
the Romans do not seem to have minded his putting twenty-eight thousand
Cordovese to death for their Pompeian politics. If I had remembered all
this from my Plutarch, I should certainly have gone to see the place
where Caesar planted that plane tree. Perhaps some kind soul will go to
see it for me. I myself do not expect to return to Cordova.