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

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

CHAPTER XIII.
THE ALHAMBRA (Continued).

BLASICHO, or, in good English, poor Blas, was an honest worker in leather, a mender of soles, in the city of Granada. There are streets in this queer old town wholly given up to one or another handicraft, and it is rather pleasing than otherwise to see the rule disproved that two of a trade can never agree. Perhaps it is easier for a whole street full of cobblers, or tinkers, or carders, or smiths, to live in peace, than it would be for only two rivals in trade, who would be jealous of each other as natural foes. It was curious to follow the walks along and see the little shops, sometimes not more than five or ten feet square, filled with the wares and the workmen, so that a customer would have had hard work to wedge himself in if he would be measured for a coat or boots, or examine the goods for sale. It looked as if there were some people willing to work, though we heard of a shoemaker who was called upon by a traveller like ourselves to repair his dilapidated shoe: the cobbler called out to his wife to tell him how much money there was on hand, and learning that she had enough to get them supper, he declined doing the work. This was in literal compliance with the Spanish rule which requires a man never to do to-day what can be put off till to-morrow.

Blasicho had a hard time of it to get work enough to earn the bread that his wife and his little ones must have from day to day, and he hated work, as all his neighbors did, and all his race do. If he had a wife with a cheerful temper, to cheer him as he beat his leather on his knee, perhaps it would have been better for him and his, for it does make work light and easy to have a good-natured woman near at hand, to say a pleasant word and hear even one’s complaints with a sympathetic smile. But the wife of Blasicho was neither fair to look upon nor gentle in her temper, and she led the poor cobbler a vexed and weary life of it. His lapstone was not harder than the heart of his spouse, and the blows that he gave it were more in number, but not more severe, than she rained upon him, when their words grew into quarrels that always ended in the thorough discomfiture of the man of the house. Her great sorrow was that she had not wealth: her sisters had found husbands who could give them the best of every thing, and as much as they required to make fine ladies of them, but she had married a cobbler too poor to live without work, and too lazy to work, and the only blessing they had in abundance was a flock of children that grew in stature and numbers every year, and demanded more and more to keep them alive. She dinned her woes into his ears, and his poor soul was worried to despair by the ceaseless pother of her querulous tongue.

He wanted money. If California had been part of the known world in the day of Blasicho’s misery, his greed would have driven him to the mines in search of gold. But gold he must have, or his wife would worry him to death. He had heard that the Moors had left heaps of gold in the earth all around him, and if he had some rod to guide him to the sacred spot where the treasure was concealed, it would be the making of him for life, to dig it and carry it home to gladden the heart of his discontented wife, and stop the everlasting run of her complaining tongue. Day after day he walked around the hill of which the Alhambra in its glory and decay is still the crown, and he studied the projecting rocks and the graceful curves and gentle depressions, and the peculiar growth of the citron and pomegranate, to discover some signs of a place where it might be that in the olden time some Moorish miser, or in later time some Spanish pirate coming home from foreign pleasures, had buried his gold. His hope was suddenly kindled into certainty. One sunny morning he was taking his daily walk about the sacred hill, and passing through the deep cut on the eastern side, where far above his head the aqueduct with the waters of the river run into the Alhambra with its refreshing and ceaseless flow, he sat down to rest awhile and muse upon his hapless lot, and the hopeless search in which he was wasting his days. He looked up at the craggy side through which the red rock cropped, and on the scanty soil in which the almond shrubs were struggling to hold their own, and he was wishing that one of those red rocks were a ruby or even a lump of gold, when a dove, whose home was in the Tower of Comares, flew down upon a projecting rock, and cocking his eye most knowingly, looked below as if it saw something there that would be worth having. Blasicho observed the motion, and the thought came to him that the dove was a messenger to point him to the spot where his treasure lay. He took note of the rock, and drew a line, with his eye, to the foot of the hill where the bird’s eye had guided his search. A few feet from the path, up the cliff-side, was a ledge of rock, and it was easy to see that, a century or two ago, a man might have stood on it and worked into the mountain and buried his gold. The ledge would be the mark by which he could find it, and its height was such that no one would suspect that such a spot would be chosen as a hiding-place for money.

Poor Bias went home with his head full of the dove and the gold. All day as he sat on his bench pretending to work, the beautiful neck of the dove, with his head turned sideways, and his one eye down looking to the ledge, was before him. That night he dreamed that he went there and broke into the hill with a pick and found a heap of gold. The next morning he went there and the dove came again, and again she peered into the ledge from above, and again Blasicho was comforted with the strengthened hope. He dreamed the second time the same, and came the third morning and the dove met him as before; and again, the third night, he dreamed that he burst into the mountain and was the possessor of more gold than his insatiable spouse had ever dreamed of having. This was more than the anxious cobbler could endure and be quiet. That night in the darkness and alone, for there was no one in Granada he could trust with his discovery, Blasicho sought the ravine, climbed cautiously to the ledge with a bar of iron to aid him in his burglary. He struck in vigorously, for it might be a long night’s work, and time was precious. The hollow sound that answered his blows quickened his heartbeats, for it assured him there was a chamber within. The débris was fast piling at his feet. He was already inside the hill. He heard something grating, rattling above and near him; he rose to his feet only to be struck with a land-slip which his digging had started: it caught him, dashed him off his perch, buried him, bruised him, half killed him, at the foot of his golden hill. The poor fellow struggled from underneath the mass of dirt and stones, and luckily finding no bones were broken, but more dead than alive, he crept home and went to sleep, while his wife was dinging into his ears her reproaches for his bad habits of being out late at nights. He was cured of hunting for gold in the dark. He became a new man, a new cobbler. His early hammer advertised his conversion. Business revived. He had to have some more help in the shop. The shop was soon too small. He wanted to enlarge it, and for that purpose he got permission of his landlord to dig away the hill in the rear to make room for an extension. This work he performed with his own hands after the day’s work in the shop. That digging made him rich! What he found he had wit enough to keep secret, even from his wife, for if his landlord should hear of it, he would lay claim to it as in his soil. But Blasicho went on with his cobbling and building. He bought a few lots in one of the fashionable quarters of Granada, and to each of his daughters, to whom suitors came in numbers, now that he was evidently prosperous, he gave a handsome house and portion.

More than all, and better, his wife’s temper improved. He and she still lived over the shop, but the apartments were embellished with all the comforts that the amiable woman wanted, and she was proud, and not humbled, when her sisters came to see her. None of them knew the source of his sudden wealth, and indeed he was cunning enough to develop gradually, so that it was attributed to his increasing business, and his good luck in trade.

He knew that it all came of his being cured of money digging, and sticking to his work. He had never heard of the Latin proverb, ne sutor ultra crepidam,—let the cobbler stick to his last,—but he knew the soundness of the principle. And he taught his grandchildren, who were fond of visiting him, that when he tried to get rich in a hurry he got nothing but wounds and bruises; but when he worked faithfully and steadily at his trade, prosperity followed his labors, and his days were crowned with plenty, contentment, and love.

An old woman sat at the foot of the stone stairway, and took the fee that admitted us to the Watch Tower. On the southern edge of the hill, and rising high above the rampart, the broad flat roof of the tower affords an off-look that scarcely has an equal for beauty of prospect and interest in historical association. A bell swings in a turret; the rope hangs within reach; and there is magic in the ring. For the second day of January is a great fête day in Granada,—the anniversary of the capture of the city by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492,—and every maiden who ascends this tower on that day, and rings the bell with her own hand, is sure to have a wedding ring on her hand in the course of the year. The bell therefore rings right merrily on the fête day from early morn to set of sun, and the sign is as sure as any of the many that love and folly have conjured.

And in the far west, across the plain, rise the Parapanda Mountains, on whose top a cloud resting is a sign of rain, and when it hangs there they say it will rain “if God wills;” but if the cloud descends the mountain-side they say “it will rain if God wills or no.”

There too, off on the verge of the plain, lies a farm of 4,000 acres which the Spanish government gave to the Duke of Wellington for his expulsion of the French, and his heirs now derive a revenue of some $20,000 annually from the land.