The wooden door and whitewashed walls --along with the open window above the bed allowing in balmy air --soon brought to mind a more tropical place.
In front of him, whitewashed dwellings lined wide cobbled streets and reflected brightly in the moonlight.
But the costume and physiognomy of the inhabitants, the narrow streets and flatroofed, whitewashed houses, and more than all, the thousands of palm-trees in its gardens and fields, give the place a strikingly Oriental aspect, and render it unique among the cities of Spain.
On an eminence in the western part of the city are the ruins of a large square citadel with a small whitewashed building, called Molud Khaneh (the house of birth), in which Fath Ali Shah was born (1772).
Cettigne itself is little more than a walled village, consisting of a cluster of whitewashed cottages and some unadorned public buildings.
The underground world was well built and bright with whitewashed walls lining corridors wide enough for two people to walk side by side.
The houses, built of stone and whitewashed, are square, substantial, flat-topped buildings, presenting to the street bare walls, with a few slits protected by iron gratings in place of windows.
A small apartment is by immemorial tradition shown as his birth-room, bearing on its whitewashed walls and its windows innumerable signatures of visitors, among which such names as Walter Scott, Dickens and Thackeray may be deciphered.
Here the traveller ascending from the coast sees the first example of the jebel or highland towns, with their high three-storeyed houses, built of quarried stone, their narrow façades pierced with small windows with whitewashed borders and ornamented with varied arabesque patterns; each dar has the appearance of a small castle complete in itself, and the general effect is rather that of a cluster of separate forts than of a town occupied by a united community.
When, in the last decade of the 19th century, works of thorough architectural investigation and repair were undertaken in that building under the superintendence of Professor Luca Beltrami, a devoted foreign student, Dr Paul Muller-Walde, obtained leave to scrape for traces of Leonardo's handiwork beneath the replastered and whitewashed walls and ceilings of chambers that might be identified with these.
The walls are tiled to a height of 4 or 5 ft., and above they are finished in plaster, whitewashed or carved into filigree work.
The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town.
