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SPAIN.
CHAPTER I.
GRANADA.
IN the grounds of the Alhambra, the ancient palace of the Moorish kings of Granada, what time those conquerors of Spain here held their right regal court, I have come to sit down and to rest.
My lodgings are just under the walls of the old castle, in sight of its crumbling towers, in hearing of its many falling waters, and under the shadow of its English elms, which the Duke of Wellington gave to Spain. At any moment a few steps take me into the courts and halls and chambers of the Alhambra. In years past, while this pearl of Arab art and Oriental splendor was silently suffered to fall into ruin, with the lapse of centuries, it has been the habit of some travelled authors more addicted to romance than others, to get the easy privilege of sharing lodgings with the bats in some deserted chamber, and they doubtless fancied themselves inspired with the genius of the place, as they dreamed and wrote where fair sultanas with their charms eclipsed the splendors of the fairy place itself.
As it is no part of my purpose to indulge in romance while writing these sketches of the Alhambra and of Spain, and as the walls of a comfortable inn are much more to the taste of a weary traveller than the stone floors and open windows of a tumbling old castle, it is my preference to take up my abode for the present with the good people in the Alhambra Hotel, and not with the keepers of the palace itself. Besides, there is no choice left. The government has undertaken the work of restoring the Alhambra to its pristine beauty, and this process is now going onward under the direction of Sr. Contreras. He has already displayed so much skill in imitating the arabesque decorations of the walls, that only a practised eye perceives the difference when the ancient and the modern art appear in the same chamber.
Architects as well as amateur travellers from all parts of the civilized world, for centuries past, have made artistic and pleasure journeys hither to study and admire the style that has nothing like it except in Spain, and here only where the Moors held sway. And perhaps no work of art in the whole world has been more frequently and fully described than the Alhambra of Granada. History, poetry, and science have tried their several hands upon it. Romance has been so busy with it that it is not an easy task to disentangle the web of fiction, and get the only part of the tale worth knowing. So dear is truth, the simple, naked truth of history, to every true soul, that he is a great doer of evil who seizes upon history, and while professing to write it, weaves into his story the fancies of his own prolific genius, and that so deftly and so charmingly that the whole is accepted as veritable history, and the romance as the most credible and interesting of the whole. Early English history has thus been illustrated and inextricably confused. The spell of the magician’s wand has thus made the conquest of Mexico a poem rather than a reliable narrative. And Spain, more than any other land, is now hopelessly given up to legends and doubtful chronicles, modern and antique, so that one who reads must have either the credulity of a devotee, or the indifference of folly, to read with satisfaction the ancient history of the Peninsula.
But the Alhambra is here! Granada is where it was a thousand years ago! The same deep blue sky, the bluest sky that covers any land, hangs over its magnificent Vega or plain, through which the Darro and the Genil, united, flow! The hills, each one with a story that can be scarcely heard without a tear, stand where and as they did when the Moors were masters of this region, which they thought the terrestrial paradise of man, and immediately under the celestial mansions where the Prophet and the Houris await the coming of all true believers. The Sierra Nevada, covered with perpetual snow, seems close at hand, as it lies on the eastern horizon, and in this cloudless sky and brilliant atmosphere the long range shines like silver mountains in the noontide, as it did when fleet horsemen brought its ice in baskets to cool the drinks of Wali Zawi Ibu Zeyn, its first Moorish king. Those snowy summits reminded the Arabs when they came here of Mount Hermon, and this plain seemed to them to surpass in fertility and beauty the Vega around Damascus.
And to this day the palm-tree, the pomegranate, and the fig, the orange and lemon, the olive and vine, flourish under the genial sun. In these declining years of the nineteenth century, with a railroad running into the city across the heart of this paradise, and telegraphs linking it with Madrid and London and Washington, the peasants still scratch the ground with the root of a tree for a plough, and carry their produce to market on the back of a donkey.
The creations of the Moors in Spain form the most remarkable chapter in human art. To me, Spain has been a new discovery; a sudden revelation of a world within a world; the monuments of an extinct or departed race standing alone in a desert. The generation that now possesses the soil has nothing of the genius or taste or spirit of the barbaric tribes that were once their masters. And the Alhambra at Granada, the Mosque at Cordova, and the Alcazar at Seville, look like the wrecks of a stranded empire, whose people live only in their glorious ruins.