Chapter 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.

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!"

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]

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.