“Hurry up!” he called out to them as they filed through the narrow, shaded Arab quarter. For once he was leading the charge. Laura and their two boys sweltering in the heat, 40C even in the shade. Sweating profusely under their baseball caps, they must have thought him mad, marching them at full pace when everyone else was taking a siesta. He couldn’t help it. He was so excited.

Cordova. The name hung over him like rich, intoxicating Arab perfume. He had longed to visit her since a child. What would she be like? Were her gardens still abloom?

As he impatiently waited for his family to catch up, he played back the image of a small boy, his head resting against his father’s shoulder watching wonder-eyed at the spectacle of Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in Africa. The air-conditioning was full on at Chox, the newest cinema in town. Even now, he could smell the freshly roasted, salted peanuts he scoffed down out of newspaper cones and taste the Canada Dry ginger ale, fizzing out of a forest-green bottle. His mind reeled from the scene that ignited his passion to visit and pay homage to this wondrous city and its revered gardens.

In the movie, Prince Feisal is assisting the British in their war against the Turks in Arabia during World War I. Feisal leads a tribe of Bedouins. His people are beggared, illiterate and lacking the most rudimentary weapons, wholly reliant on the meagre alms the British are willing to hand down to them.

Sitting cross-legged in his tent, Feisal laments, “Nine hundred years ago, we were great. Did you know Lieutenant Lawrence, in the Arab city of Cordova, there were two miles of street lighting when London was a village?”

“Yes, you were great,” Lawrence admitted.

“Nine hundred years ago.”

“Time to be great again, my lord.”

“My father is old and I…I long for the vanished gardens of Cordova.”

Why the emphasis on the gardens?

Shortly before seeing the movie, he had attended an obligatory religious class. There, an Arab missionary had proclaimed, “There is Heaven on Earth. It lies in the gardens of Cordova.”

Arabs were desert-faring tribes. Their one love was for the desultory oases that gave respite from sand, heat and dust. They recreated their heaven in Cordova, a garden scented by exotic flowers, luxuriating amid pools of water.

The more he heard about the wondrous gardens, the more his imagination bloomed, strengthening his determination to see them for himself.

In 1960 he existed as the sole coloured person in a large low-housing council estate in England. His working-class family and their neighbours still wallowed in the might and superiority of the British Empire. If you weren’t English, you were inferior. Coming from Africa, you were tagged a “wog”.

While the little boy in him didn’t see it then, the grown up understood the subconscious harm of relentless disrespect shown and the constant reinforcement of his inferiority. In the world he inhabited, no reference was made to a Muslim civilization nor of its worth. He had to hear it in a movie. Muslims were great… once. When London was a mere backwater, there existed a Muslim city that possessed street lighting. As he grew up, doubt niggled that Cordova, the once great capital of an Arab empire, still existed.

Cordova. The name spilled from his mouth like a bouquet of vintage wine.

Despite his desire to see this landmark for himself, he wanted to leave the Mezquita, the Alcazar and its gardens to the end. They took a couple of days respite in a boutique hotel at the edge of town, managing some desultory walks with visits to the occasional museum. Neither streets nor museums showed any sign or reference to Arab street lighting. Whereas the Arabs loved water and greenery, the Spanish converted them to cobblestoned plazas and courtyards.

Today, as they negotiated the narrow, winding streets, well before reaching their destination, they heard the tumult ahead. Abruptly, the narrow street widened onto a square, overwhelmed with sightseers. It could have been any tourist trap in Europe. They battled through a surging tide of humanity towards the walled entrance of the Mezquita- Catedral.

A dozen gift shops peddling tawdry artefacts lined up for inspection. To each were attached sinewy queues of school-goers or elderly couples clutching to each other for support. Ice cream parlours and snack bars were subjected to the same fate.

His family gingerly stepped over sticky chocolate wrappers, discarded chewing gum and plastic pop bottles. They vied for a foothold with streams of tourists desperate to keep up with their guides, who brandished pennants atop fully extended silvery car aerials that glistened in the sun. Guitar players strummed while perched upon discoloured brick embankments in front of the walled Mezquita. Chaos reigned, with neither dignity nor reverence for the third largest mosque in the world.

They trudged through a gated entrance to the Mezquita’s forecourt. What had once been a lawn the size of a football field, raised six inches above the ground, was upturned by rust-orange under soil. With no sign to advise visitors to keep off the grass, groups of students balanced on their haunches, huddled in small circles, twiddling with their phones. The lucky ones found shelter from the sun’s grinding blaze, under a handful of trees struggling to survive. The lineups were endless. Thank goodness he had purchased tickets in advance.

Laura and the boys didn’t look well at all. Drooping from the perpetual enervating heat, they fell into silent torpor.

From glaring sunlight, they entered cool refreshing shade. Hundreds of arches, nine feet tall, of beige and wine-red marble, loomed through the darkness at them. Each colour was layered one atop the other, transforming the arches into variegated stripes. Their splendour and excess spoke to the power of the Moors when Cordova (now called Cordoba) was their capital, from which they governed the bulk of Spain for centuries. In his pamphlet, an Arab scholar described the architecture as “countless pillars like rows of palm trees swaying in the oases of Syria.” Even in the dark, they took his breath away. The whole family stood transfixed.

Their commune was shattered by the howl of a child barging into them. Loud, brash voices echoed throughout this gigantic prayer hall, punctuated by the flash of cameras. The hall was dark and musty. Its floor caked with dirt.

In Africa, he accompanied his aunt each morning to market. On their way, they would tarry awhile at their mosque to make their obeisance. At that hour, rows of women volunteers, their backs hunched, swept clean the rush-matted marble floor. Where were the sweepers today? This sacred place of worship was now transmuted into a theme park, with kids let rampant, treating it as their personal playground.

When the Spaniards recaptured their land, they obliterated all signs of Arabia until recent times. Mosques were converted to churches. Chapels were installed within the Mezquita, along with a cruciform nave and a transept. Observing the bloated crowd around him, this new-found Spanish enthusiasm for its Moorish past and its culture convinced him, more than ever, that it was a ploy to lure further visitors and their lucre to resuscitate the country’s moribund economy.

He directed Laura to a place where she could light a candle and dedicate a prayer. The boys were cut loose with a promise to return within half-an-hour. He was left alone to find his own place of belonging.

Peace was interrupted within minutes.

“Pops, Pops come see this.” Invigorated by the cooler temperature indoors, the boys’ voices shook with excitement. They hauled him hurriedly to the other end of the Mezquita. A lighted glass cabinet displayed cartouches – small tablets of sparkling white stone-each bearing the hallmark of master builders of this great edifice. Why this was so important to the boys, he couldn’t fathom. Then it dawned on him. They had carved cartouches at school. The boys saw the Mezquita as another ancient curiosity, with no visceral connection. The closest they could come was their common experience with cartouches. Laura was drawn directly to the chapels and offertories, a direct connection to her ongoing religious practice. What of himself? He saw the Mezquita as it should have been, a functioning mosque. He drew comparison to his own in Africa, where his community came to prayer and, in so doing, coalesced as one. Half a century on, it was still so alive to him. The Mezquita should have been more than a relict, swaying onlookers with its intrinsic beauty. It had been robbed of its spirituality.

They gathered up Laura, walked out of the entrance and on to the Alcazar, the caliph’s palace, and gardens. His footsteps slowed and shortened as they neared. They had passed through so much human detritus to get here, a glimpse of Heaven on Earth- vouched by chroniclers and poets of the ages. What would he find? His heartbeat quickened.

“No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.” Another quote from Feisal addressed him.

The Alcazar was a stone’s throw away from the Mezquita. In the past, a private covered walkway joined the two to provide shade for the caliph and his sultana as they walked to and from the Mezquita. Unlike the caliph, he and his family had no protection from the sun, contending themselves with a march across a square of cobblestones before arriving at the entrance. The crowd thinned the closer they got. His thoughts drifted to the Alcazar’s past which the boy in him had created. Where he had envisioned dozens of beggars sitting cross-legged in front of the entrance, beside vendors of sweetmeats, nuts and fruits, and sellers of exotic flowers, fragrant necklaces of jasmine and frangipani, he found only a bicycle rack installed by the entryway. A solitary man was selling plastic bottles of filtered water out of steel buckets of ice for a Euro. No beggars. No other vendors in sight. He inspected the ground before him. No rubbish, toffee wrappers or discarded ticket stubs.

They entered through a narrow gate. One path led to the Alcazar, another to the gardens.

The grand Guadalquivir River flowed beside them, feeding three tiers of pools. On each side, shallow-curved, cream-tiled channels, barely a foot wide, continuously circulated water from one tier down to the next. In accordance with Arab custom, fountains spouted noiselessly. The lush gardens lay in stark contrast to the browned, bruised lawn before the Mezquita. Unlike the forecourt of the mosque, here the vegetation flourished. Hedges, plants, and magnificent pillar- sculptured cypress trees, thirty feet high, returned their gaze. A grid of boxwood provided the framework for a series of rose gardens.

The darkness of the Mezquita, its coloured arches faded with grime, was forgotten under the spell of roses exploding into colour- canary yellow, pale pink, carnation red, even powder blue. Their perfume hijacked his senses. Stock plants of variegated colours and hues imparted their own special odour akin to vanilla and cloves. Fewer visitors allowed the garden to retain its mystique. For a moment he closed his eyes, picturing the caliph and his bride, leisurely strolling through the gardens at twilight on their way to prayer, bathing in the prescient scents of Heaven on Earth.

Cordova. At last, he had found his home.

He turned around and froze in his tracks.

In the Muslim faith, no image of a mortal was allowed. Statues of Spanish royalty scarred the landscape. The Spanish had trampled over the sacrosanct. Included in the roster of statues, King Ferdinand stood before his Queen Isabella. It was here that Columbus came to seek their audience to finance his journey to the new world. Their goal? To acquire even more wealth and power. As

they had annihilated the Arabs, so they would go on to do the same to the grand and ancient civilizations of the Americas; to plunder lucre, not from common tourists, but gold, silver, and precious stones from the heart of sacred temples, destroying them all in the process.

Out of nowhere, he remembered the local bully from his council house days. “Oi! You wog. Go back home.” His intimidation and disrespect.

He looked back at the statues. The same mark of disrespect reflected off them. What had society learned in the centuries between those worldly royals and that illiterate bully? Where was the home he was supposed to go back to? As he watched Laura and his boys discussing the gardens, its roses and stock, he realized he had once again become a stranger in his own home.

What about his family?

Born in Canada, schooled in Canada, his boys had no doubt as to who they were or where they belonged. They were pukkah Canadians and Calgarians to boot. Each spring saw Laura return to her family in the Philippines for two months, to a home erected by her father before she was born, nestled among a brood of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Each year she organized reunions of her friends and classmates- those that had remained steadfastly at home and those who had succeeded in the New World. Now retired, they came home to renew their camaraderie.

The gardens were fast vanishing behind them as Laura gushed with enthusiasm over the flowers, their layout and care. “Boys, what shall we plant in OUR garden?” she asked.

– Emil Rem

Author’s Note: “The Vanished Gardens of Cordova” was written after a family trip to Spain and reflects on my history with the area, and the changes both internal and external, that I saw over the years.