The gardens of the Generalife are beyond all praise. Water bubbles up everywhere, and moistens the roots of gorgeous oleanders, myrtles, orange trees, cedars, and cypresses—the tallest trees in Spain. Beneath one of these—that to the right as you reach the head of the first flight of steps—the sultana is alleged to have kept her tryst with Hamet, the Abencerrage. Not a bad place, this, for a lovers' meeting. You rise from one flower-laden terrace to another till you reach the ugly belvedere—scribbled all over with idiots' names—whence you obtain a ravishing view of the Alhambra, the city, the Vega, and the mountains. The hours spent in the Generalife Gardens will be remembered as among the pleasantest of one's lifetime.
It may be, as a French writer states, impossible to tickle the surface of Granada without discovering Moorish remains, but certainly, outside the Alhambra, very few are to be seen above ground. The most conspicuous of them in the lower town is, on the whole, the Casa del Carbon, a dilapidated structure with a bold horseshoe archway which confronts you as you cross the Reyes Catolicos near the Post Office. The house is now used as a coal depot, but beneath the thick coating of grime you may discern the traces of graceful decorative work. The building is said to have been a corn exchange in Moorish days. More interesting are the vestiges of the ancient walls that girdled the oldest quarter, el viejo Albaicin. They were built in great part by Christian captives—perhaps by those whose chains are hung up on the walls of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo. The Moors of Granada grew embittered by their reverses, and treated their Christian subjects harshly. The martyrs whom the monument on the Alhambra hill commemorates are not merely the creatures of pious imagination. There is an ugly story, too, of an unfortunate monk accused of heretical doctrines, who took refuge at Granada and was burnt at the stake by the Moslems.
Two of the old gatehouses on this side of the city are still standing. They are massive crenellated towers, pierced with round-headed archways. I do not consider them entrancingly picturesque; they form the northern entrances to the Albaicin quarter, which is now a perplexing congeries of squalid houses, formless convents, and churches tottering to their fall. Whatever interest its antiquity may excite is lost in disgust at its wretchedness. On the outskirts dwell the gipsies—mostly in semi-underground burrows, and left very much to themselves by the local authority. These are the poor creatures who are dragged out to bore visitors with their wearisome dances, the fee charged for which goes almost entirely into the pockets of the guides. The gipsies of Spain are not nomadic. There are people in Granada who wish they were.
In the Albaicin the Zirite sultans had their palaces, one of which was called the House of the Weathercock, from the bronze figure of a horseman that surmounted it and served as a vane. Washington Irving has written a story about it. Fragments of all these ancient buildings are incorporated with modern houses, and may be identified by those who care to take the trouble. Romantic legends (of the precise nature of which I am ignorant) cluster round the Casa de las Tres Estrellas, possibly because it affords ingress to a subterranean passage leading no man knows whither. But I do not think you will be tempted to linger long in this odoriferous, wormeaten quarter. You may be said to have escaped from it when you reach the picturesque Carrera de Darro, the embankment of that narrow stream facing the Alhambra. Here may be seen a Moorish bath at one of the private houses, and—much more delightful to the artist—a broken Moorish bridge, the Puente del Cadi, to which a path led down from the Torre de las Armas. Against the little church near this point you will notice a white corner house with a handsome doorway in the Renaissance style. At the angle of the house is a balcony, bearing the odd inscription, "Esperandola del Cielo" ("Waiting for it from Heaven"). The words are accounted for by the following story: The house was built by Hernando de Zafra, the astute secretary of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the negotiator of the capitulation of Granada. He suspected his daughter of a love affair with an unknown cavalier. To satisfy his doubts he surprised her one day, and found his page assisting the lover to escape by the window. Baulked of his prey the enraged father turned upon the lad. "Mercy," implored the page. "Look for it in Heaven!" answered the Don, as he hurled his daughter's accomplice after her lover into the street below. There are those who say that De Zafra had no daughter, and that he has been libelled in this matter. But the episode is more probable than the foreign-made yarns about the Alhambra.
