Chapter II

An English lady, conversing with a Sevillan gentleman who had been making some rather tall statements, asked him: "Are you telling me the truth?"

"Madam," he replied, gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, "I am an Andalusian!" At which the surrounding listeners, his fellow-countrymen, broke into an appreciative laugh.

So proverbial is the want of veracity, or, to put it more genially, the imagination, of these Southerners. Their imagination will explain also the vogue of their brief, sometimes pathetic, yet never more than half-expressed, scraps of song, which are sung with so much feeling throughout the kingdom to crude barbaric airs, and loved alike by gentle and simple. I mean the _Peteneras_ and _Malagueñas_. There are others of the same general kind, sung to a variety of dances; but the ruling tunes are alike--usually pitched in a minor key, and interspersed with passionate trills, long quavers, unexpected ups and downs, which it requires no little skill to render. I have seen gypsy singers grow apoplectic with the long breath and volume of sound which they threw into these eccentric melodies amid thunders of applause. It is not a high nor a cultivated order of music, but there lurks in it something consonant with the broad, stimulating shine of the sun, the deep red earth, the thick, strange-flavored wine of the Peninsula; its constellated nights, and clear daylight gleamed with flying gold from the winnowing-field. The quirks of the melody are not unlike those of very old English ballads, and some native composer with originality should be able to expand their deep, bold, primitive ululations into richer, lasting forms. The fantastic picking of the _mandurra_ accompaniment reminds me of Chinese music with which I have been familiar. Endless preludes and interminable windings-up enclose the minute kernel of actual song; but to both words and music is lent a repressed touching power and suggestiveness by repeating, as is always done, the opening bars and first words at the end, and then breaking off in mid-strain. For instance:

"All the day I am happy,
But at evening orison
Like a millstone grows my heart.
All the day I am happy." [_Limitless Guitar Solo._]

It is like the never-ended strain of Schumann's "Warum?" The words are always simple and few--often bald. One of the most popular pieces amounts simply to this:

"Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo
Swordsmen are of quality,
Since when they the bulls are slaying--
O damsel of my heart!
They do it with serenity.
Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo
Swordsmen are of quality."

But such evident ardor of feeling and such wealth of voice are breathed into these fragments that they become sufficient. The people supply from their imagination what is barely hinted in the lines. Under their impassive exteriors they preserve memories, associations, emotions of burning intensity, which throng to aid their enjoyment, as soon as the muffled strings begin to vibrate and syllables of love or sorrow are chanted. I recalled to a young and pretty Spanish lady one line,

"Pajarito, tu que vuelas."

She flushed, fire came to her eyes, and with clasped hands she murmured, "Oh, what a beautiful song it is!" Yet it contains only four lines. Here is a translation:

"Bird, little bird that wheelest
Through God's fair worlds in the sky,

Say if thou anywhere seest
A being more sad than I.
Bird, little bird that wheelest."

Some of these little compositions are roughly humorous, and others very grotesque, appearing to foreigners empty and ridiculous.

The following one has something of the odd imagery and clever inconsequence of our negro improvisations:

"As I was gathering pine-cones
In the sweet pine woods of love,
My heart was cracked by a splinter
That flew from the tree above.
I'm dead: pray for me, sweethearts!"

There was one evening in Granada when we sat in a company of some two dozen people, and one after another of the ladies took her turn in singing to the guitar of a little girl, a musical prodigy. But they were all outdone by Cándida, the brisk, naïve, handsome serving-girl, who was invited in, but preferred to stand outside the grated window, near the lemon-trees and pomegranates, looking in, with a flower in her hair, and pouring into the room her warm contralto--that voice so common among Spanish peasant-women--which seemed to have absorbed the clear dark of Andalusian nights when the stars glitter like lance-points aimed at the earth. Through the twanging of the strings we could hear the rush of water that gurgles all about the Alhambra; and, just above the trees that stirred in the perfumed air without, we knew the unsentinelled walls of the ancient fortress were frowning. The most elaborate piece was one meant to accompany a dance called the _Zapateado_, or "kick-dance." It begins:

"Tie me, with my fiery charger,
To your window's iron lattice.
Though _he_ break loose, my fiery charger,
Me he cannot tear away;"

and then passes into rhyme:

"Much I ask of San Francisco,
Much St. Thomas I implore;
But of thee, my little brown girl,
Ah, of thee I ask much more!"

The singing went on:

"In Triana there are rogues,
And there are stars in heaven.
Four and one rods away
There lives, there lives a woman.
Flowers there are in gardens,
And beautiful girls in Sevilla."

Nevertheless, we had been glad to leave Sevilla, especially since during our stay an epidemic was in progress, graphically called "the minute," from its supposed characteristic of finishing off a victim ready for the undertaker in exactly sixty seconds after attacking him.

The inhabitants of Granada likewise seemed to be a good deal occupied in burying themselves--a habit which became confirmed, no doubt, during the wars and insurrections of their ancestors, and is aided to-day by bad sanitary arrangements. We saw a dead man being carried in the old Moorish way, with his forehead bared to the sky, a green wreath on his head, his cold hands emerging from the shroud in their last prayer-clasp, and quite indifferent to the pitiless sun that beat down on them. But, perched as we were on the Alhambra Hill, high above the baking city, such spectacles were transient specks in the world of fascination that infolded us.

Granada rests in what might pass for the Happy Valley of Rasselas, a deep stretch of thirty miles, called simply the Vega, and tilled from end to end on a system of irrigation established by the Moslem conquerors. Rugged mountains, bastions of a more than Cyclopean earthwork, girdle and defend it. To penetrate them you must leave the hot rolling lands of the west, and confront steep heights niched here and there for creamy-hued villages or deserted castles, and sentried by small Moorish watch-towers rising like chessmen on the highest crests. The olive-trees spread on wide slopes of tanned earth were like thick dots of black connected in one design, and seemed to suggest the possible origin of Spanish lace. The shapes of the mountains, too, were extravagant. One of the most singular, the _Peñon de los Enamorados_, near Antequera, showed us by accident at a distance the exact profile of George Washington, with every detail after Stuart, hewn out in mountain size and looking directly up into the heavens from a position of supine rigidity. Our first intimation of a near approach to Granada was a long stretch of blanched folds showing through evening mistiness in the southern sky, like the drapings of some celestial tabernacle, so high up that they might have been clouds but for a certain persistent, awful immobility that controlled them. Their spectral whiteness, detached from the earth, hung, it is true, ten thousand feet above the sea-level; but they were not clouds. They were the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the great Snowy Range.

Twenty miles to the north of these frosty heights stands the Alhambra Hill, shrouded in dark trees, and dominated by the Mountain of the Sun. The names are significant--Snowy Range and Mountain of the Sun--for the landscape that unrolls itself between these ridges is a mixture of torrid glow and Alpine coldness. I stood in a hanging garden delicious with aromatic growths, on the ramparts beside the great Lookout Tower, the city lying like a calcareous deposit packed in the gorge of the Darro's stream below. Across the Vega I beheld that sandy pass of the hills through which Boabdil withdrew after his surrender--the Last Sigh of the Moor. Fierce sunlight smote upon me, spattering the leaves like metal in flux; but the snow-fields mantling the blue wall of the Sierra loomed over the landscape so distinct as to seem within easy hail, and I felt their breath in a sweet coolness that drifted by from time to time. The other mountains were bare and golden brown. But in their midst the mild Vega, inlaid with curves of the River Genil, receded in breadths of alternate green orchard and mellow rye, where distant villages are scattered "like white antelopes at pasture," says Señor Don Contreras, the accomplished curator of the Alhambra. It was not like a dream, for dreams are imitative; nor like reality, for that is too unstable. It was blended of both these, with a purely ideal strand. As I looked at the rusty red walls and abraded towers palisading the hill, the surroundings became like some miraculous web, and these ruins, concentring the threads, were the shattered cocoon from which it had been spun.

The Alhambra was originally a village on the height, perhaps the first local settlement, surrounded by a wall for defensive purposes.

The wall, which once united a system of thirty-seven towers, fringes the irregular edges of the hill-top plateau, describing an enclosure like a rude crescent lying east and west. At the west end the hill contracts to an anvil point, and on this are grouped the works of the citadel Alcazaba, governed by the huge square Lookout Tower. On a ridge close to the south stand the Vermilion Towers, suspected of having been mixed up with the Phoenicians at an early epoch, but not yet fully convicted by the antiquarians. The intervening glade receives a steep road from the city, and is arcaded with elms and cherries of prodigious size, sent over as saplings by the Duke of Wellington half a century ago. There the nightingales sing in spring-time, and in summer the boughs give perch to other songsters. Ramps lead up to the top of the hill, and on the northern edge of its crescent, at the brink of the Darro Valley, the Alhambra Palace proper is lodged.

We shall go in by the Gate of Justice, through a door-way running up 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.