Within the walls where they had been born and lived, there they would linger! Among those enchanting courts, beside gushing fountains, the song of birds, the scent of flowers. The soft shadows of pale groves, and those painted halls, the very picture books of history and of song.
Now, all is to be abandoned. The royal treasure packed, the inlaid walls stripped of their hangings, the gold vessels set with pearls, the carved platters for perfumed water, the turbaned crown and royal robes and garments woven in Persian looms, the accumulated treasures of centuries, unknown to the outer world, unspeakable, garnered in the lace-walled recesses of the harem.
At break of day all must depart into a cold and arid world—the stately Sultana, La Horra, and Boabdil’s large-eyed queen, in robes of death and mourning, bearing ashes on their heads, followed by all the pomp of an Eastern court. Guards, slaves, mutes, and eunuchs, passed out of the gate of the Siete Suelos, the conquered city sleeping at their feet, while on the opposite side, by the Gate of Justice with the mystic hand, rode in a dazzling company of Christian knights, lighted up by the rising sun—Aragonese and Castilian horsemen with round casques, knights in chain-armour rattling their spears, gold-tabarded trumpeters, men-at-arms and arquebusiers with hedges of lances and bucklers, led by the primate of Spain, bearing in his hand the silver cross to be planted on the signal tower of the Vega.
CHAPTER XXVI
The End of the Moors
T the end of the Alameda, outside Granada, there is a bridge over the Xenil, opening from a broad and lofty avenue of elms. How gay it is! The murmur of the green-tinged river! The soft, warm wind among the trees, the borders of old-fashioned flowers! How majestic the infinite whiteness of the range of the Sierra Nevada backing all, a smooth, pure world lost in a firmament of blue!
Beyond is a road along which carts and coaches roll, a dirty, muddy country road, leading to Motril, and from that to the sea, passing through barriers of mountains.
A mile or so on, a little chapel, dedicated to San Sebastian, lies to the right, close on the road. You might pass it a thousand times without notice, it is so dark and small. Yet, homely as it looks, there is no place in all the range of history more sacred than this spot.
It is the 2d of January, 1492, when Boabdil el Chico, King of Granada, mounted on a powerful war-horse, rides slowly forth from the Alhambra by the gate of the Siete Suelos. We know his face, from a portrait in the palace of the Generalife—a sad-expressioned visage, as of one born to ill-luck, swarthy-complexioned, with coal-black hair under his turban; and we know too, that at his special request, the gate of the Siete Suelos has been walled up from that day, and so remains, encumbered by huge masses of masonry, over which time has cast a softening hand in trails of vine leaves and low shrubbery.
Slowly he descends the hill by a winding path still existing, cleaving the steep ravine, very stony now, and difficult to traverse, and passing by high walls (to be called henceforth the Cuesta de los Matires), crosses the bridge over the Xenil, gallops down the road, and draws rein before the chapel of San Sebastian, then a mosque.