“Yes, yes, let us go,” cried the gipsy eagerly, and gliding down the spacious hall, the two moved on, seeking that exquisite colonnade from which the Moors commanded a view of the whole valley and plain in which Granada stands. Now all was darkness. The slender marble shafts blended and bedded in with coarse mortar, were scarcely visible. The moonbeams broke against the rude walls, and fell powerless from the beautiful arches which they had once flooded with silvery light; but the lovers walked on through all this gloom reassured, and with their thoughts all centred in each other once more. Aurora forgot her fears, and he was not of an age or temperament to yield himself long to gloomy fancies.
At length they entered a small chamber, still in good repair, and flooded with a moonlight which swept through the delicate columns of a small balcony or temple that jutted from the outer wall. The pavement seemed flagged with solid silver, the moonbeams lay so hard and unbrokenly upon it, and received these exquisite shadows as virgin ivory takes the soft traces of an artist’s pencil. The glow of rich fresco paintings broke out from the walls, brilliant as when the colors were first laid on by order of that Vandal Charles. In the soft scenic obscurity, the deformity or mutilations of time were unseen. You missed the frost-like Moorish tracery from over that bed of colors, but scarcely felt the loss amid the misty gorgeousness that replaced it.
They passed through this room and went out upon the marble colonnade. Nothing but the delicate Moorish shafts I have mentioned stood between them and the beautiful plain of Granada. Lights still sparkled in all directions over the old city, as if heaven had sent down a portion of its stars to illuminate a spot that so nearly resembled itself. The gentle undulations of the plain were broken into hills and ridges of the richest green. The soft haze blended with the moonlight where it lay upon the horizon. The mountains that overlooked all this, on the left, were cut up with ravines full of black shadows, green as emerald at the base, glittering with snow at the top.
Close by was that belt of huge dark trees, sweeping around the old fortress, with glimpses of the Darro breaking up through the dusky foliage—on the right, a dim convent nestled among the hills, and nearer yet, the vine-draped ascent of Sierra del Sol, with its mountain villa, its Darro waters, its orange terrace, and rose hedges, all filling the sweet night with melody and fragrance! Do you wonder that they forgot themselves?—that they looked on a scene like this filled only with a delicious sense of its beauty?
The air was balmy with fragrance, yet cool from the mountain snows, invigorating, and still voluptuous. The entire stillness, too—nothing was astir but the sweet, low sounds of nature, the rustle of myrtle thickets, the mournful shiver of a cypress tree as the wind sighed through it, the movement of a bird in its nest.
Is it strange, I say, that all this beauty became food to the love that filled their young lives with its first tumultuous emotions? That while they forgot that love, and thought only of the scene before them, it grew the stronger from neglect? When they did speak, it was in low tones, and as if a loud word might disturb the entire happiness that reigned in each full heart.
“Aurora, you have been here many times before, and at this hour, perhaps—say, have your eyes ever fallen upon the scene when it was beautiful as now?” murmured the young man, dreamily.
“I do not know; I have seen it a thousand times, but never, never felt that it was really beautiful. To-night it seems as if I had just been aroused from sleep—that all my life has been one dull stupor. I shudder at the remembrance of what I was. I pant for new scenes of beauty—new emotions, these are so full of joy. Tell me, Busne, my own, own Busne, does happiness like this never kill? I grow faint with it as one does when the orange trees are thick overhead, and burdened with blossoms. My breath comes heavily as if laden with their fragrance. I long to creep away into the shadows, yonder, and cry myself to sleep.”
“Why do you wish to weep, my bird? Tears are for the unhappy.”
“Yet you see that I am weeping; my eyes are blinded; the lights down yonder seem floating in a mist. I cannot see, and yet I know that you are smiling there in the moonlight. It is happiness, oh, such happiness that floods my eyes.”