two-thirds of its tower's height, and culminating in a little horseshoe
arch, whereon a rude hand is incised--a favorite Mohammedan symbol of
doctrine. We pass a poor pictured oratory of the Virgin, and some
lance-rests of Ferdinand V., to worm our way through the grim passage
that cautiously turns twice before emerging through an arch of pointed
brick with enamellings on argil, into the open gravelled Place of the
Reservoirs. This is undermined by a fettered lake, generally attributed
to the Moors, but more probably made after Isabella's conquest. On the
right side, behind hedges and low trees, is reared that gray rectangular
Græco-Roman pile which Charles V. had the audacity to begin. His palace
is deservedly unfinished, yet its intrusion is effective. It makes you
think of the terror-striking helmet of unearthly size in the Castle of
Otranto, and looks indeed like a piece of mediæval armor flung down here
to challenge vainly the wise Arabian beauty of the older edifice. To the
Place of Reservoirs come in uninterrupted course all day the tinkling
and tasselled mules that carry back to the city jars of fresh water,
kept cool in baskets filled with leaves. And hither walk toward sunset
the _majos_ and _majas_--dandies and coquettes--to stroll and gossip for
an hour, even as we saw them when we were lingering at the northern
parapet one evening and looking off through the clear air, in which a
million rose-leaves seemed to have dipped and left their faint color.
III.
The veritable entrance to the Alhambra is now buried within some later
buildings added to the original. But it never, though Irving naturally
supposed the contrary, had a grand portal in the middle. Gorgeous and
showy means of ingress would not have suited the Oriental mind. The
exterior of the palace and all the towers is dull, blank,
uncommunicative. Their coating of muddy or ferruginous cement, marked
here and there by slim upright oblongs of black window spaces, was not
meant to reveal the luxury of loveliness concealed within. The Moslem
idea was to secrete the abodes of earthly bliss, nor even to hint at
them by outward signs of ostentation.
So the petty modern door cut for convenience is not wholly out of
keeping. It ushers one with a sudden surprise into the presence of those
marvels which have been for years a distant enticing vision. You find
yourself, in fact, wandering into the Alhambra courts as if by accident.
The first one--the Court of the Pond, or of the Myrtles--arrays before
us beauty enough and to spare. But it is only the beginning. A long tank
occupies the centre, brimmed with water from a rill that gurgles, by day
and night forever, with a low, half-laughing sob. Around it level plates
of white marble are riveted to the ground, and two hedges of clipped
myrtle border the placid surface. At the nearest end a double gallery
closes the court, imposed on seven arches so evenly rounded as to
emulate the Roman, but upheld by columns of amazing slenderness; and in
the spandrels are translucent arabesques inlaced with fillets, radiating
leaf-points, and loose knots. Above these blink some square windows,
shut as with frozen gauze by minute stone lattice-work, over fifteen
hundred twisted or cubed pieces being combined in each. From there the
women of the harem used to witness pageantries and ceremonies that took
place in the court; and over the veiled windows is a roofed balcony
repeating the lower arches, which would serve for spectators not under
ban of invisibility.
[Illustration: BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA.
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
Various low doors lead from this Court of the Pond, giving sealed
intimation of what may lie beyond, but disclosing little. One turns
naturally, however, to the Hall of Ambassadors at the other end, in the
mighty Tower of Comares. The transverse arcade at the entrance is roofed
with shining vitreous-faced tiles of blue and white that also carry
their stripes over the little cupola, to which many similar ones
doubtless formerly surrounded the court, and in the cloister underneath
the inmates reclined on divans glinting with rippled gold-thread and
embroidered with colored silks. Then comes the anteroom, the Chamber of
Benediction (usually called of the Boat, on account of its long, scooped
ceiling), which is like the hollow of a capsized boat suspended over us,
and darkened with deep lapis lazuli. There are some low doors in the
wall, meant for the humble approach of slaves when serving their
masters, or leading to lost inner corridors and stairways now fallen
into dust. But the large central arch conducts at once into the Hall of
the Ambassadors, after we have passed some niches in which of old were
set encarmined water-jars of sweet-scented clay. Beside these may have
stood the carven racks for weapons of jewelled hilt and tempered blade.
In the Chamber of Benediction begin those multitudinous arabesques by
which the Alhambra is most widely known. In the hall beyond they flow
out with unimpeded grace and variety over the walls of an immensely high
and nobly spacious apartment, pierced on three sides at the floor level
with arched _ajimez_[8] windows halved by a thin, flower-headed column,
in the embrasures of which, enchased with cement, are mouldings that
overrun the groundwork in bands, curves, diamonds, scrolls, delicate as
the ribs of leaves or as vine tendrils. Within these soft convolved
lines, arranged to make the most florid detail tributary to the general
effect, Arabic characters twisted into the design contain outbursts of
poetry celebrating the edifice, the room itself. "As if I were the arc
of the rainbow," says one inscription in the hooped door-way, "and the
sun were Lord Abul Hachach." The windows look forth upon the sheer
northern fall of the hill; the waving tree-tops scarcely rising to the
balcony under the sills. They look upon old Granada dozing below in the
unmitigated sunlight, with here and there the sculptured columns of a
_patio_ visible among the houses on the opposite slope; and farther away
the Sesame doors of gypsy habitations cut into the solid mountain above
the Darro. One of the most beautiful of glimpses about the Alhambra is
that through the east window, looking along the parapet gallery to the
Toilet Tower. Precipitous masonry plunges down among trees that shoot
incredibly high, as if incited by the lines of the building; and on the
Mountain of the Sun the irregular lint-white buildings of the
Generalife--an old retreat of Moorish sovereigns and nobles--are lodged
among cypresses and orange thickets. Within the hall itself all is cool,
subdued, and breezy, and the smooth vault of the larch-wood ceiling,
still dimly rich with azure and gold, spans the area high overhead like
a solemn twilight sky at night.
It was in this Tower of Comares that the last King of Granada, Boabdil,
was imprisoned with his mother, Ayeshah, by his stormy and fatuous
father, Muley Abul Hassan, owing to the rival influence of the Morning
Star, Zoraya, Hassan's favorite wife. Boabdil escaped, being let down to
the ground by the scarfs of his mother and her female attendants. Years
after, when he had succeeded to the throne for a brief and hapless
reign, _El Rey Chico_ (The Little King), as the Spaniards called him,
was led by his mother into the Hall of Ambassadors after he had
capitulated to Ferdinand and Isabella. Silently she made its circuit
with him, and then, overcome with the bitterness of loss, she cried:
"Behold what thou art giving up, and remember that all thy forefathers
died kings of Granada, but in thee the kingdom dies!"
[Illustration: THE TOILET TOWER.
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
The Hall of Ambassadors is assigned to the epoch of the caliphate.
Certainly the Court of Lions is invested with a somewhat different
character. Its arches are more pointed, more nearly Gothic, and are
hung upon a maze of exquisitely slight columns, presenting, as you look
in, an opulent confusion of crinkled curves and wavering ellipses,
bordered with dropping points and brief undulations that look like
festoons of heavy petrified lace: as lace, heavy; but as architecture,
light. There is incalculable diversity in the proportions, unevenness in
the grouping of the pillars, irregularity in the cupolas; yet through
all persists an unsurpassable harmony, a sensitive equilibrium. The Hall
of Justice, which opens from it, and contains--contrary to Mohammedan
principles--some mysterious early Italian frescoes depicting Moorish and
Christian combats, is a grotto of stalactites. All this part of the
palace, one would say, might have sprung from the spray of those hidden
canals which brought the snow-water hither, spouting up, then falling
and crystallizing in shapes of arrested motion; so perfect is the
geometrical balance, so suave are the flowing lines. The un-Moorish
lions sustaining the central basin are meagre and crude, and the size of
the court is disappointing; but it is a miniature labyrinth of beauty.
From one side you may pass into the Hall of the Abencerages, under the
fine star-shaped roof of which a number of those purely Arab-blooded
knights are said to have been, at the instigation of their
half-Christian rivals, the Zegris, assembled at a banquet and then
murdered. An invitation to dinner in those days was a doubtful
compliment, which a gentleman had to think twice about before accepting.
On the other side lies the access to the Chamber of the Two Sisters, a
lovely apartment, having a grooved bed in the marble floor for a current
of water to course through and run out under the zigzag-carven cedar
door. Everything is exactly as you would have it, and you seem to be
straying through embodied reveries of Bagdad and Damascus. But it would
be futile to describe the myriad traceries of these rooms; the bevelled
entablatures, the elastic ceilings, displaying an order and multiplicity
of tiny relief as systematic as the cells and tissues in a cut
pomegranate; or the dadoes of colored tiles, still dimly glistening with
glaze, and chameleonizing the base of the partitions. The culmination of
microscopic refinement comes, with a sigh of relief from such an
overplus of sensuous delight, in the boudoir of Lindaraxa, which
overlooks from a superb embayed window a little oasis of fountained
court, blooming with citrons and lemons, and bedded with violets. That
small garden, green and laughing, and interspersed with dark
flower-mould, lies clasped in the branching wings of masonry, as simple
and refreshing as a dew-drop. It is shut in on the other side by some
mediæval rooms fitted up in heavy oak panelling for Philip V. and his
second bride, Elisabetta, when with rare judgment they chose this
Islamitic spot for their honey-moon--a crescent, I suppose. It was in
one of these rooms--the Room of the Fruits--that, to quote Señor
Contreras again, "the celebrated poet Washington Irving harbored,
composing there his best works." From which it will be inferred that the
gallant Spaniard has not probed deeply the "Knickerbocker History of New
York," the "Sketch-book," and the "Life of Washington."[9]
[Illustration: BOUDOIR OF LINDARAXA]
One may prolong one's explorations to the Queen's Toilet Tower--who "the
queen" was remains decidedly vague--poised like a lofty palm on the
verge commanding the Darro gorge. In one corner of its engirdling
colonnade are some round punctures, through which perfume was wafted to
saturate the queen's garments while she was dressing. Or one may descend
to the Baths, vaulted in below the general level. Their antechamber is
the only portion which has been completely restored to its pristine
magnificence of blue and gold, vermilion-flecked and overspreading the
polygonal facets of stucco-work. I could imagine the Sultan coming there
with stately step to be robed for the bath by female slaves, then
passing on wooden clogs into the inner chamber of heated marble, and at
a due interval emerging to take his place on one of the inclined slabs
in an outer alcove, enveloped in a _tcherchef_--his head bound with a
soft silk muffler--there to devote himself to rest, sweetmeats, and lazy
conversation.
The Alhambra Palace is remarkable as being more Persian than Turkish,
and reproducing many features that crop up in the architecture of India,
Syria, Arabia, and Turkey, yet incorporating them in an independent
total. The horseshoe arch is not the prevailing one, though it occurs
often enough to renew and deepen the impression of its unique effect.
What makes this arch so adroitly significant of the East? Possibly the
fact that it suggests a bow bent to the extremest convexity. It is easy
to imagine stretched between the opposite sides a bow-string--that handy
implement of conjugal strangulation which no Sultan's family should be
without.
Part of the populous ancient settlement on the hill still exists in a
single street outside of the palace, now inhabited by a more respectable
population than that riffraff of silk-weavers, vagabonds, potters,
smugglers, and broken-down soldiers who flourished there half a century
since. A church stands among the dwellings. Strolling up the street one
moonlit night, we bought some blue and white wine-pitchers of
Granada-ware at a little drinking-shop, and saw farther on a big circle
of some twenty people sitting together in the open air--one of those
informal social clubs called _tertulias_, common among neighbors and
intimate friends in all ranks of Spanish society. At another spot a man
was sleeping in the moonlight on a cot beside the parapet, with his two
little Indian-looking boys dreaming on a sheet laid over the ground.
Mateo Ximenes, the son of Irving's "Son of the Alhambra," lives in this
quarter, officiating as a guide. Thanks to "Geoffrey Crayon" he is
prosperous, and has accordingly built a new square house which is the
acme of commonplace. Beyond the street, across some open ground where
figs and prickly-pears are growing, stands the Tower of the Captive,
where Isabella de Solis, a Christian princess, being captured, was
imprisoned, and became the wife of Abul Hassan. She was, in fact, the
Zoraya who became Ayeshah's rival. Dense ivy mats the wall between this
and the Tower of the Princesses--a structure utilized by Irving in one
of his prettiest tales. Both towers are incrusted interiorly with a
perfection rivalling the palace chambers, and perhaps even more
enchanting, but no vestige of coloring is left in them. To me this wan
aspect of the walls is more poetic than any restoration of the original
emblazonments. The pale white-brown surface seems compounded of historic
ashes, and is imbued with a pathos,
"Like a picture when the pride
Of its coloring hath died,"
which one would be loath to lose.
The sunlit and vine-clad decrepitude that sits so lightly on this magic
stronghold--this "fortress and mansion of joy," as one of the mural
mottoes calls it--is among its main charms. The most bitter opponent of
any Moorish return to power in Granada would, I think, be the modern
æsthetic tourist. I rambled frequently close under the old
rufous-mottled walls, from which young trees sprout up lustily, and
enjoyed their decay almost as much as I did the palace. At one point
near the Tower of Seven Stories (which has never quite recovered from
being blown up by the French) there was a long stretch of garden where
phlox and larkspur and chrysanthemums, that would not wait for autumn,
grew rank among the fruit-trees. A Moorish water-pipe near the top of
the wall had broken, and, bursting through the brick-work, its current
had formed a narrow cascade that tumbled into the garden through
wavering loops of maiden-hair, and over mosses or water-plants which it
had brought into life on the escarpment. Grapes and figs rose
luxuriantly about rings of box enclosing fountains, and at sunset some
shaft of fire would level itself into the greenery, striking the
gorgeous pomegranate blossoms into prominence, like scarlet-tufted
birds' heads. All day there was a loud chir of cicadas, and a rain of
white-hot light sifted through the leaves. But at night everything died
away except the rush of water, which grew louder and louder till it
filled the whole air like a ghostly warning. I used to wake long after
midnight, and hear nothing but this chilling whisper, unless by chance
some gypsies squatted on the road were singing _Malagueñas_, or the
strange, piercing note of the tree-toad that haunts the hill rung out in
elfin and inhuman pipings of woe. For the builders who laid them here
these running streams make a fit memorial--unstable as their power that
has slipped away, yet surviving them, and remaining here as an echo of
their voices, a reminder of the absent race which not for an hour can
one forget in Granada.
But the supreme spell of the Alhambra reserves itself for moonlight.
When the Madonna's lamp shone bright amid the ingulfing shadows of the
Tower of Justice, while its upper half was cased in steely radiance, we
passed in by Charles's Palace, where the moon, shining through the
roofless top, made a row of smaller moons in the circular upper windows
of the dark gray wall. In the Court of the Pond a low gourd-like
umbellation at the north end sparkled in diamond lustre beneath the
quivering rays; while the whole Tower of Comares behind it repeated
itself in the gray-green water at our feet, with a twinkle of stars
around its reversed summit. This image, dropped into the liquid depth,
has dwelt there ever since its original was reared, and it somehow
idealized itself into a picture of the tower's primitive perfection. The
coldness of the moonlight on the soft cream-colored plaster, in this
warm, stilly air, is peculiarly impressive. As for sound, absolutely
none is heard but that of dripping water; nor did I ever walk through a
profounder, more ghost-like silence than that which eddied in
Lindaraxa's garden around the fountain, as it mourned in silvery
monotones of neglected grief. The moon-glare, coming through the lonely
arches, shaped gleaming cuirasses on the ground, or struck the
out-thrust branches of citron-trees, and seemed to drip from them again
in a dazzle of snowy fire; and when I discovered my two companions
looking out unexpectedly from a pointed window, they were so pale in the
brilliance which played over them that for a moment I easily fancied
them white-stoled apparitions from the past. As we glanced from the
Queen's Peinador, where the black trees of the shaggy ascent sprung
toward us in swift lines or serpentine coilings as if to grasp at us, we
saw long shadows from the towers thrown out over the sleeping city,
which, far below, caked together its squares of hammered silver, dusked
over by the dead gray of roofs that did not reflect the light. But
within the Hall of Ambassadors reigned a gloom like that of the grave.
Gleams of sharp radiance lay in the deep embrasures without penetrating;
and, at one, the intricacies of open-work above the arch were mapped in
clear figures of light on a space of jet-black floor. Another was filled
nearly to the top by the blue, weirdly luminous image of a mountain
across the valley. Through all these openings, I thought, the spirits of
the departed could find entrance as easily as the footless night breeze.
I wonder if the people who lived in this labyrinth of art ever smiled?
In the palpitating dusk, robed men and veiled women seemed to steal by
with a rustle no louder than that of their actual movement in life; silk
hangings hung floating from the walls; scented lamps shed their beams at
moments through the obscurity, and I saw the gleam of enamelled swords,
the shine of bronze candlesticks, the blur of colored vases in the
corners; the _kasidas_ of which poetry-loving monarchs turned the pages.
But in such a place I could not imagine laughter. I felt inclined to
prostrate myself in the darkness before I know not what power of by-gone
yet ever-present things--a half tangible essence that expressed only the
solemnity of life and the presentiment of change.
IV.
It is not surprising that Isabella the Catholic, who had so completely
thrown her heart into the conquest of Granada, should have wished to be
buried in that city, though dying far away. Her marble semblance rests
beside that of Ferdinand in the Royal Chapel, which serves as vestibule
to the ugly Renaissance cathedral. The statues are peculiarly
impressive, and sleep on high sepulchres of alabaster, beautifully
chased. Both of them are placed with their heads where, if sentient,
they might contemplate the astonishing reredos of the altar--a wooden
mass piled to the roof, and containing many niches filled by figures
carved, gilded, and painted with flesh-color. Among them is John the
Baptist standing upright, with blood gushing from his severed neck,
while the head which has just quitted it is being presented on a charger
to Herodias's daughter. There are other hideous things in this strange
and brutal church ornament, which is a museum of monstrosities; but
parts of it depict the triumphs of the royal pair, and it was no doubt
accordant with their taste. Their bodies lie in a black vault under the
floor, which we visited by the light of a single candle. Two long bulks
of lead, with a simple letter F. on one and an I. on the other; that was
all that marked the presence of two great monarchs' earthly part. Juana
the Mad, Charles V.'s mother, rests in another leaden casket--the poor
Queen, whom her famous son probably reported crazy for his own political
purposes, but whose supposed mania of watching her dead husband's body,
in jealous fear that he could still be loved by other women, has been
effectively treated in Padilla's picture. Her husband, Philip the Fair,
lies on the opposite side. Hardly could there be a more impressive
contrast than that between this tomb under the soft, musty shadows of
the chapel--all that is left of the conqueror--and that glorious
sun-imbued ruin on the hill--all that is left of the conquered. Two
mighty forces met and clashed around Granada in 1492; and, when the
victory was won, both receded like spent waves, leaving the Alhambra to
slow burial in rubbish and oblivion, under which Washington Irving
literally rediscovered it. How fine a coincidence that the very spot
from which Isabella finally despatched Columbus on his great quest
should owe so much to a son of the new continent which Columbus
discovered!