Enough for the negative side. For praise, if the Alhambra itself is disappointing, its setting is imperial. The view on which you look out from its romantic ajimez windows has few equals in the world, and accounts easily for the supremacy of this spot in man's thought. You look down on the ravine of the Darro, the white Generalife near by, across the river, the piled-up houses of Granada backed by near hills covered with cactus. From the Torre de la Vela is a grander view. The vega with towns and historic battlefields lies below, and you try to pick out Santa Fé, which sprang up in eighty days to house the Christian troops, or Zubia, where Isabella was almost captured, or Puente de Pinos, which the discouraged Columbus had reached when the Queen's messenger brought him back to arrange for the great voyage. On this tower, after seven and a half centuries of Moorish rule, the first Christian standard was hoisted by Cardinal Mendoza, on January 2d, 1492, festival still of the countryside, when the fountains play again in the Alhambra, and down in the Royal Chapel the Queen's illuminated missal is used on the altar. All Christian Europe rejoiced with Spain, and Henry VII in England had a special Te Deum chanted in gratitude. While on one side is this tropical vega on the other is the glorious Sierra Nevada, clothed in perpetual snow. So close are the mountains that on certain days it seemed as if a short hour's walk could reach them, closer than the Jungfrau to Mürren. It is the most untarnished expanse of snow I have seen on any mountains. We often climbed the tower for the sunset, and one evening a genuine Alpine glow made the Sierras magnificent past description. "Ill-fated the man who lost all this!" Charles V exclaimed.
There was a lesser view we grew attached to, that from the strip of garden called the Adarves, warm in the sun under the vine-covered bastions. It was laid out by the Emperor, and it fronts the snow range looming above the green mass of park trees. Almost every day we would bring books and sewing there—December, with mountains 12,000 feet high beside us!—and the gardener would set chairs for us at the stone table. Work and books would be dropped for long minutes to look out on those astonishingly noble mountains. If only the city below were well-ordered and clean like Avila or Segovia or Seville, this would be the spot of all Spain for a long stay.
We had to descend at times to the repulsive town for sightseeing. We hunted up the Church of San Gerónimo, where the Gran Capitán, that true Castilian knight alike renowned as general and diplomatist, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was buried. Once around his tomb seven hundred captured banners were ranged, but the church since it was sacked in the French invasion has been unused. It was appropriate that the Great Captain found burial in Granada, since it was here he trained the famous legions he was to lead to victory in Italy. Isabella on her deathbed listened with thrilled interest to the news of Gonsalvo's exploits at Naples. Another day, to see the view of the Sierras from the Church of San Nicolás, we climbed the Albaicín quarter, so squalid and poverty-stricken that the very sheets hung out to dry were a fretwork of patches, and the smells of goats and pigs were awful. A swarm of deformed beggars gathered round us, and I must confess to driving them off indignantly. Then as we descended the hill, down the twisting oriental passages, I was reproached by a little episode that showed a charity wider than mine—not good utilitarian ethics perhaps, but good early Christianity—a woman, poorest of the poor, at a turning of the lane was giving her mite to one more stricken in misery. Is it any wonder Spain can win affection with her good and her evil lying close beside each other in a grand primitive way? Whenever I joined her detractors and abused her, within the hour she would offer some silent rebuke.
Still another walk was the beautiful one along the Darro, then up the steep hill between the Generalife and the Alhambra. In that deserted lane one morning as I was passing alone, suddenly the gypsy king stepped out, a startling image of brutal, manly beauty, with his blue-black hair topped by a peaked hat. He approached insolently, with a glance of contemptuous, piercing boldness, struck an attitude, and holding out a package, commanded: "Buy my photograph." With beating heart I hurried by, to turn into the safe Alhambra enclosure with a tremor of relief.
The Cathedral of Granada is a pretentious Greco-Roman building, good of its kind, but I do not like that kind. Out of it leads the Royal Chapel, where "los muy altos, católicos, y muy poderosos Señores Don Ferdinando y Doña Isabel" lie buried with their unfortunate daughter, Juana la Loca, and her Hapsburg husband. These two elaborate Renaissance tombs, the wood carved retablo and a notably fine reja, make this Capilla Real a unique spot. Isabella the queen left a last testament that breathes the fine sincerity of her whole life: "I order that my body be interred in the Alhambra of Granada in a tomb which will lie on the ground and can be brushed with feet, that my name be cut on a single simple stone. But if the king, my lord, choose a sepulchre in any other part of our kingdom, I wish my body to be exhumed and buried by his side, so that the union of our bodies in the tomb, may signify the union of our hearts in life, as I hope that God in his infinite mercy may permit that our souls be united in heaven." It seems as if a king whose life-long mate had been an Isabella of Castile might have had more dignity of soul than to give her a trivial successor. When Ximenez heard of her death, sternly-repressed man of intellect though he was, he burst into lamentation. "Never," he exclaimed, "will the world again behold a queen, with such greatness of soul, such purity of heart, with such ardent piety and such zeal for justice!" And the Cardinal had known her in the undisguised intimacy of the Confessional and stood side by side with her through years of difficult state guidance. The astute Italian scholar, Peter Martyr, who lived at her court, said that at the end of the fifteenth century Isabella had made Spain the most orderly country in Europe, and another foreign scholar, Erasmus, tells us that under her, letters and liberal studies had reached so high a state that Spain served as a model to the cultivated nations.
From one end of her land to the other this incomparable woman has left her mark; at Valladolid the remembrance of her marriage; Segovia whence she started out to claim her kingdom; at Burgos the tomb of her parents; Salamanca where her son was educated, and whose library façade is in her grandiose style; Avila where this only son lies buried; Santiago where her hospice still harbors the needy; Seville where she gave audience in the Alcázar; her refuge for the insane here in Granada;—hardly a city that she did not visit and endow:
"If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness,
Thy meekness saint-like, wife-like government
Obeying in commanding, and thy parts
Sovereign and pious, else could speak thee out
The Queen of earthly queens."
VIGNETTES OF SEVILLE
"Mi vida está pendiente
Solo en un hilo,
Y el hilo está en tu mano, dueño querido.
Mira y repara,
Que si el hilo se rompe
Mi vida acaba."
CANTAR ANDALUZ.