Granada rests in what might pass for the Happy Valley of Rasselas, a deep stretch of thirty miles, called simply the Vega, and tilled from end to end on a system of irrigation established by the Moslem conquerors. Rugged mountains, bastions of a more than Cyclopean earthwork, girdle and defend it. To penetrate them you must leave the hot rolling lands of the west, and confront steep heights niched here and there for creamy-hued villages or deserted castles, and sentried by small Moorish watch-towers rising like chessmen on the highest crests. The olive-trees spread on wide slopes of tanned earth were like thick dots of black connected in one design, and seemed to suggest the possible origin of Spanish lace. The shapes of the mountains, too, were extravagant. One of the most singular, the Peñon de los Enamorados, near Antequera, showed us by accident at a distance the exact profile of George Washington, with every detail after Stuart, hewn out in mountain size and looking directly up into the heavens from a position of supine rigidity. Our first intimation of a near approach to Granada was a long stretch of blanched folds showing through evening mistiness in the southern sky, like the drapings of some celestial tabernacle, so high up that they might have been clouds but for a certain persistent, awful immobility that controlled them. Their spectral whiteness, detached from the earth, hung, it is true, ten thousand feet above the sea-level; but they were not clouds. They were the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the great Snowy Range.
Twenty miles to the north of these frosty heights stands the Alhambra Hill, shrouded in dark trees, and dominated by the Mountain of the Sun. The names are significant—Snowy Range and Mountain of the Sun—for the landscape that unrolls itself between these ridges is a mixture of torrid glow and Alpine coldness. I stood in a hanging garden delicious with aromatic growths, on the ramparts beside the great Lookout Tower, the city lying like a calcareous deposit packed in the gorge of the Darro's stream below. Across the Vega I beheld that sandy pass of the hills through which Boabdil withdrew after his surrender—the Last Sigh of the Moor. Fierce sunlight smote upon me, spattering the leaves like metal in flux; but the snow-fields mantling the blue wall of the Sierra loomed over the landscape so distinct as to seem within easy hail, and I felt their breath in a sweet coolness that drifted by from time to time. The other mountains were bare and golden brown. But in their midst the mild Vega, inlaid with curves of the River Genil, receded in breadths of alternate green orchard and mellow rye, where distant villages are scattered "like white antelopes at pasture," says Señor Don Contreras, the accomplished curator of the Alhambra. It was not like a dream, for dreams are imitative; nor like reality, for that is too unstable. It was blended of both these, with a purely ideal strand. As I looked at the rusty red walls and abraded towers palisading the hill, the surroundings became like some miraculous web, and these ruins, concentring the threads, were the shattered cocoon from which it had been spun.
The Alhambra was originally a village on the height, perhaps the first local settlement, surrounded by a wall for defensive purposes.
The wall, which once united a system of thirty-seven towers, fringes the irregular edges of the hill-top plateau, describing an enclosure like a rude crescent lying east and west. At the west end the hill contracts to an anvil point, and on this are grouped the works of the citadel Alcazaba, governed by the huge square Lookout Tower. On a ridge close to the south stand the Vermilion Towers, suspected of having been mixed up with the Phœnicians at an early epoch, but not yet fully convicted by the antiquarians. The intervening glade receives a steep road from the city, and is arcaded with elms and cherries of prodigious size, sent over as saplings by the Duke of Wellington half a century ago. There the nightingales sing in spring-time, and in summer the boughs give perch to other songsters. Ramps lead up to the top of the hill, and on the northern edge of its crescent, at the brink of the Darro Valley, the Alhambra Palace proper is lodged.
We shall go in by the Gate of Justice, through a door-way running up two-thirds of its tower's height, and culminating in a little horseshoe arch, whereon a rude hand is incised—a favorite Mohammedan symbol of doctrine. We pass a poor pictured oratory of the Virgin, and some lance-rests of Ferdinand V., to worm our way through the grim passage that cautiously turns twice before emerging through an arch of pointed brick with enamellings on argil, into the open gravelled Place of the Reservoirs. This is undermined by a fettered lake, generally attributed to the Moors, but more probably made after Isabella's conquest. On the right side, behind hedges and low trees, is reared that gray rectangular Græco-Roman pile which Charles V. had the audacity to begin. His palace is deservedly unfinished, yet its intrusion is effective. It makes you think of the terror-striking helmet of unearthly size in the Castle of Otranto, and looks indeed like a piece of mediæval armor flung down here to challenge vainly the wise Arabian beauty of the older edifice. To the Place of Reservoirs come in uninterrupted course all day the tinkling and tasselled mules that carry back to the city jars of fresh water, kept cool in baskets filled with leaves. And hither walk toward sunset the majos and majas—dandies and coquettes—to stroll and gossip for an hour, even as we saw them when we were lingering at the northern parapet one evening and looking off through the clear air, in which a million rose-leaves seemed to have dipped and left their faint color.