VI

The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the

unparalleled beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect

of art, the inspiration of its founders is affirmed by their choice of

an outlook which commands one of the most magnificent panoramas in the

whole world. It would be useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think

of far-off silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away

from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and towers,

and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and orchards and

forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective; think of steep and

sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, and one

crooked stream stealing snakelike in their depths; think of whatever

splendid impossible dramas of topography that you will, of a tremendous

map outstretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have some

notion of the prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and

perhaps not. Of one thing we made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the

Darro, and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the traveler visits

at the risk of his life in order to have his fortune told. At the same

moment we made sure that we should not go nearer it, for though we knew

that it was insurpassably dirty as well as dangerous, we remembered so

distinctly the loathsomeness of the gipsy quarter at Seville that we

felt no desire to put it to the comparison.

We preferred rather the bird’s-eye study of the beautiful Generalife

which our outlook enabled us to make, and which we supplemented by

a visit the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our

hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers up and

down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so steep that

at a certain point the electric current no longer suffices, and the car

bites into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under-jaw and

so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, with a conductor so

affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt after

a single day we should soon become brothers, or at least step-brothers.

Whenever we left or took his car, after the beginning or ending of the

cogway, he was alert to see that we made the right change to or from

it, and that we no more overpaid than underpaid him. Such homely natures

console the traveler for the thousand inhospitalities of travel, and

bind races and religions together in spite of patriotism and piety.

We were going first to the Cartuja, and in the city, which we found

curiously much more modern, after the Latin notion, than Seville, with

freshly built apartment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not

so modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter said to have

been assigned to the Moors after the fall of Granada. The dust lay thick

in the roadway where filthy children played, but in the sunny doorways

good mothers of families crouched taking away the popular reproach of

vermin by searching one another’s heads. Men bestriding their donkeys

rode fearlessly through the dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant

woman, who sat hers plumply cushioned and framed in with a chair-back

and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future

shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.

When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since

suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited

for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the

church door, where she shared in our impartial alms. We were admitted

to the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, who went for one of the

remaining monks to show us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope

of clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself from it only

long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a

picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious to get

back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a church

which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar treasures of painting,

sculpture, especially in wood, costly marble, and precious stones

than any other I remember. According to my custom, I leave it to the

guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics of Spanish art

to celebrate the pictures and statues; it is enough for me that I have

now forgotten them all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by

certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time

when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions of all

other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent. When the monk

had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings (bad as their

subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes fall back upon his newspaper

before the door had well closed upon us.

The beggarmen had waited in their places to give us another chance

of meriting heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old

beggarwoman. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were

sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper

big-dog in her leathern palm I said, _“Adios, madre.”_ Then happened

something that I had long desired. I had heard and read that in Spain

people always said at parting, “Go with God,” but up to that moment

nobody had said it to me, though I had lingeringly given many the

opportunity. Now, at my words and at the touch of my coin this old

beggarwoman smiled beneficently and said, “Go with God,” or, as she put

it in her Spanish, “_Vaya vested con Dios.”_ Immediately I ought to

have pressed another coin in her palm, with a _“Gracias, madre; muchas

gracias,”_ out of regard to the literary climax; but whether I really

did so I cannot now remember; I can only hope I did.