Suddenly the first beams of the sun streamed down the white slopes of the far Sierra Nevada, touched the vast fertile plain, and wrought magic with a castled hill which floated up, dreamlike, from a purple haze where a great city lay asleep. Clustering vermilion towers blazed with the gold of dawn, and dazzled our eyes with the glamour of romance. For the sleeping city was Granada, and the red towers and gardens on the castled hill were the towers and gardens of the Alhambra.
The adventure was over. And under one of those roofs, dove-grey in the dawn, I hoped that Monica was sleeping.
XXXVI
Wiles and Enchantments
In spite of dykes and dams, said Dick, we had arrived at a place to visit which had once seemed to him as wonderful as finding the key of the rainbow. Yet here we were; and Granada—after we had entered at last by crossing still another river—came out from under its spell of enchantment when we saw it at close quarters. Only that wonderful hill above was magical still, as magical to the eye as when Ibraham the astrologer decreed its gardens.
More than half the miradored Moorish houses had given place to modern French ones; and descendants of the banished owners in far Tetuan and Tunis, might as well fling their keys and title-deeds away.
The dome of Isabella's cathedral and the towers of old, old churches rose from among the roofs of commonplace streets; ordinary shops of yesterday and to-day ran up the steep hill towards the Alhambra; but at a great gateway—la Puerta de las Granadas, raised by Charles the Fifth—the centuries opened and let us drive through into the past.
At this hour of the morning, the deep green forest of the Alhambra park, beyond the classic arch, was still as the enchanted wood which hid from the world the Sleeping Beauty in her palace. The nightingales had gone to sleep, and the daylight birds had finished their first concert, but another voice was singing, the joyous high soprano of water—water unseen, rippling through subterranean channels; water seen tumbling in crystal runnels on either side of the road in its bubbling way downhill.