The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

“He speaks of the good people who lived here when he lodged in the Alhambra, and a fair maiden to whom he gave the name of Dolores, and a noble young man, Molina, or something like that; what ever became of them, can you tell me?”

Bensaken gave a low little laugh, and said that Dolores was a coarse and dowdy drudge, whom the warm imagination of the author had invested with purely rhetorical charms, and the other occupants of the palace had no claims to distinction. One of them whom he mentioned was murdered in a street brawl, and the whole family had passed into oblivion. Yet their names will live in the stories of the Alhambra while the genial and smoothly flowing pages of Irving are read as the pleasantest and most reliable account of the traditions of this wondrous pile.

We went down into the garden of the Queen’s prison, and on a little patch of green we stood while Bensaken pointed to the gallery where she was permitted to walk and take the air and enjoy the sunlight, but the various chambers to which she was restricted had no exit. This was not very close confinement, to be sure, but it becomes intolerable, even the luxury of a palace, with a flower garden in its court, and gorgeous hangings and gilded ceilings and marvellous sculptures, if the royal lodger is a prisoner, and hopes for no exit but through the gate that opens in the tomb.

And then we visited the “Hall of Two Sisters,” so fancifully named because of two immense marble slabs, which form a part of the pavement. The decorations of this apartment are exceedingly beautiful. The stalactite roof is said to consist of 5,000 pieces, and though all this plaster ornamentation is supported only by reeds, it remains almost unbroken as it was when first put up. These were the private apartments of the wives and slaves of the Sultan, and were furnished with couches and divans, and the walls are covered with love poems, in the glowing language of the East, celebrating the sensual delights of these voluptuaries of the harem. All that architecture and upholstery, poetry and taste could supply for the embellishment of chambers of pleasure, were lavished with wasteful profusion here, or, to use the more familiar terms of our Western phraseology, “they were got up regardless of expense.”

Passing out upon a balcony we looked down upon the Linderaka gardens, which once were the delight of a princess whose name, Linda Raxa, was the same as Pretty Rachel; she became a Christian, and her story, if put into the hands of a skilful manufacturer, would make a beautiful romance, with more truth than is necessary for half a dozen modern historical novels. The dressing-room of the Queen in one of the towers has a look-out upon the surrounding country; the Sierra Nevada, rising 11,000 feet, and so near in this clear atmosphere that it seems close at hand, and one feels the coolness of the snow-cliffs on its sides; there is the house, now a college, where Christians suffered martyrdom under Domitian and Nero; those huts in the hill in front and those holes into the hill itself are the habitations of gypsies, whose home is Spain, and who are very numerous in these parts; the city of Granada itself lies at our feet; once it had more than a thousand towers, and now it has more than 500, and they are monuments of departed glory. Yet there is nothing in the city so mournfully eloquent of human folly and frailty as the ruin in which we are standing. Here is a wide marble slab, pierced with twelve holes, and below the slab is the chamber where the perfume was prepared, and as it ascended the Queen stood over these holes, and was made suitably fragrant! In the days of Esther similar means were evidently in use, and they were probably quite as salutary and agreeable as the modern condensations which in a bag or bottle furnish the necessary facilities for making lovely woman odorous to her friends.

Down below was a suite of rooms where the baths for the Sultan and the children were arranged, with pipes for the supply of hot and cold water, as convenient as in “a house with all the modern improvements.” Places for couches, galleries for musicians whose melodies would make the luxury of the bath more enjoyable; the pavement is of white marble, the roof is pierced with holes like stars, and the whole arrangement corresponds with the baths of Turkey and Cairo at the present day.

The Vermilion Tower.

And the long passage through which we were now conducted led to the dungeons of the castle; most of them are walled up, but one was left open that we might see how short and easy was the mode of disposing of an unhappy victim of jealousy or revenge, who could be built into a recess and find it a dying bed and grave. It was a long subterranean walk till we came out to the governor’s court. Here I saw what I had not supposed to be possible,—a marble slab bent into the shape of a bow by the weight of a wall falling and resting upon it.

On every balcony and at every window the wise Bensaken was ready with a tale of love, or blood, or gold; and it would be hard to say in which he most delighted to indulge. He was sure that out of this window the beautiful Zoraya, the “Morning Star” of Abu Hazen, she that was once Dona Isabel de Solis, a fair Christian captive who became the favorite Sultana, and the mother of Boabdil, let him down by a basket into an abyss from which he escaped and saved his life, to become afterwards the last of the race of princes here. But I must tell you one of his stories that he knows to be true, and which has never yet been entered into any chronicles of the Alhambra.