I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in
the house, or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which
I could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and
looked down and over the most beautiful, the most magnificent scene that
eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. Beside us and before us
the silver cup of the Sierra Nevada, which held the city in its tiled
hollow, poured it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine
which brightened and darkened its spread in a thousand radiances
and obscurities of windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking
gardens. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say
now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine
moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges
honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the
wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it
dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it
had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang
of pure ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, and closed
the window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not
latch, and we were obliged to ring for a _camerero_ to come and see what
ailed it.
[Illustration: 27 TO THE ALHAMBRA]
The infirmity of the door-latch was emblematic of a temperamental
infirmity in the whole hotel. The promises were those of Madrid, but the
performances were those of Segovia. There was a glitter, almost a glare,
of Ritz-like splendor, and the rates were Ritz-like, but there the
resemblance ceased. The porter followed us to our rooms on our
arrival and told us in excellent English (which excelled less and less
throughout our stay) that he was the hall porter and that we could
confidently refer all our wants to him; but their reference seemed
always to close the incident. There was a secretary who assured us that
our rooms were not dear, and who could not out of regard to our honor
and comfort consider cheaper ones; and then ceased to be until he
receipted our bill when we went away. There was a splendid dining-room
with waiters of such beauty and dignity, and so purple from clean
shaving, that we scarcely dared face them, and there were luncheons
and dinners of rich and delicate superabundance in the menu, but of an
exquisite insipidity on the palate, and of a swiftly vanishing Barmecide
insubstantiality, as if they were banquets from the _Arabian Nights_
imagined under the rule of the Moors. Everywhere shone silver-bright
radiators, such as we had not seen since we left their like freezing
in Burgos; but though the weather presently changed from an Andalusian
softness to a Castilian severity after a snowfall in the Sierra, the
radiators remained insensible to the difference and the air nipped the
nose and fingers wherever one went in the hotel. The hall porter, who
knew everything, said the boilers were out of order, and a traveler who
had been there the winter before confirmed him with the testimony that
they were out of order even in January. There may not have been any fire
under them then, as there was none now; but if they needed repairing now
it was clearly because they needed repairing then. In the corner of one
of our rooms the frescoed plastering had scaled off, and we knew that
if we came back a year later the same spot would offer us a familiar
welcome.
But why do I gird at that hotel in Granada as if I knew of no faults in
American hotels? I know of many and like faults, and I do not know of a
single hotel of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as that
hotel in Granada. The details which the sunlight of the morrow revealed
to us when we had mastered the mystery of our window-catch and stood
again on our balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moonlight
picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a more incredible scene of
mountain and plain and city, it gave us one particular tree in a garden
almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing
to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot
tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made
up of “patines of bright gold.” Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it
darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it
in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning
we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,
Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.