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

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

And that gap in the mountains is the pass where Moor and Christian, the Cross and Crescent, have encountered each other in murderous fight, when knights in armor met hand to hand, and in protracted battles far more bloody and fierce than in our modern warfare they contended for the possession of this beautiful vale.

It is called the vega, or the plain, and from the watch-tower on which we are now standing we have the best view of it. Two rivers, like those that watered Paradise, flow across it,—the Darro, which the Moors called Hadaroh and the Romans Calom, and the Genil, which the ancients knew as the river Singilis. This fertile and beautiful plain stretches thirty miles or more away from the city of Granada, like a vast amphitheatre, a prairie sea: now and then a white cluster of houses, a little village, like an island on the surface of this great ocean of corn and wine. The snow-clad heights of Sierra Nevada rise to the bluest of blue heavens that cover it as an infinite dome, and the five-hundred-towered city stands on this rocky height in the midst of this magnificent panorama, the green meadows and vineyards of the vega below, the white-capped mountains around, and the cerulean skies, so pure, so deep, so lovingly bending over and embracing the whole.

But the bell on the watch-tower answers a better purpose than merely to ring husbands for the lively Spanish girls. This plain is to be watered by these rivers, and they must be led away from their own banks by artificial channels to the thousands of plantations into which it is divided. But the rivers are not sufficient to allow the continuous flow of water through all these canals for irrigation, and the time and quantity of water are regulated by law. Each man has his water-gate, through which the stream is to come, and the hour when he is to open his gate and when to close is announced from the tower. At the stroke of one, all within a certain distance open their gates, and the water flows in upon their fields, until the bell strikes again, when they close, and the next open theirs, and so the supply is extended from one to another and the whole plain is watered.

The “Sigh of the Moor” is the name of that mountain in the south-east horizon, on the way to the sea-coast, and it gets its name from the tradition that when the last of the Moorish kings, the unhappy Boabdil of whom we have been speaking often, was flying from the city, he paused here, and as he looked back upon Granada “he saw a light cloud of smoke burst from the beautiful and beloved Alhambra, and presently a peal of artillery told that the throne of the Moslem kings was lost for ever. ‘Allah Achbar, God is great!’ he exclaimed; and, unable to refrain his grief, he burst into a flood of tears. ‘Weep not,’ said his mother, the stern proud Azeshah, ‘weep not as a woman for the loss of a kingdom which you knew not how to defend as a man.’”

As Bensaken pointed to the mountain of “El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro,” and told this sad story of the Sigh of the Moor, the tears stood in the old man’s eyes, and he was actually in sympathy with the Moor Boabdil who ran away from this tower nearly four hundred years ago.

Behind those hills, and in the valley beyond, there are to this day villages inhabited by a race of people who retain the Moorish manners and customs, mingling the Roman and Mahometan forms of worship, using no knives or forks, but eating with their fingers, in the Oriental style, and preserving with traditional jealousy the prejudices of the race that has been so long extinct in Spain. Rarely does a traveller climb the heights that stand between those settlements and the higher civilization of the plains and cities, but the few who push their adventurous way into those uninviting regions find themselves suddenly carried back into life and times of which we read now-a-days as if in the pages of romance.

Walking across the tower, we look down into a court, where a guard of soldiers is keeping watch over a prison! And, to our amazement, we find that we are in the very midst of the walls that contain four or five hundred political prisoners, who are here in durance vile for real or suspected offences. It is not the fashion at present to put to death political offenders, and the poor fellows that are shut up in these walls, hopeless and helpless, are perhaps on the whole disposed to think themselves better off than if they had lost their heads. Once the late queen punished the whole of her congress, some hundred and fifty, and sent them to prison, or foreign parts, thinking that their room was worth more than the advice they were disposed to give her. Some of the prisoners here confined are men of high social standing and of commanding influence in the country, but in the miserable strife for power and wealth, and the game of politics, which is more corrupt, if possible, here in Spain than in our own country, they have fallen victims to successful rivals, and are now wasting away in the dungeons of the Alhambra. Some of them had obtained the special favor of working in the gardens and among the flowers and shrubbery; and, under the genial beams of the bright sun in winter, they found a grateful mitigation of their sufferings.

We had seen enough for one day, and took a ride over the city. Bensaken pointed out, as we passed the modest mansion in which the late beautiful Empress of the French was born. Her father, Count Montejo, fell in love with a daughter of the British consul at Malaga, Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose name unites Scotland and Ireland. The count married her, and Eugenie is their daughter. Her grandfather is therefore a Scotch-Irish-English gentleman. Some of her relatives are not of much account. One of them asked of me the gift of a glass of whiskey.

Not far from the Alhambra, and a pleasant walk across the fields, is the Generaliffe, a pleasure-palace in olden time, a retreat in the country from the more stately grandeur and closer confinement of the citadel.

It has been preserved with greater care, or perhaps restored from time to time, and is now one of the most interesting remnants of the Moorish dynasty. Its courts are paved with marbles, gladdened with fountains and flowers, and from some of them tall cypresses rise, which in other countries would rather adorn a burial-place than a palace court. One of them is the famous tree under which the beautiful Sultana Zoraya was sitting when one of the Abencerrages came to prefer a petition, and being seen to kneel before her, was suspected of making love, and her life and that of all his family was the forfeit. Bensaken was greatly provoked by the evident disposition of the writers of historical tales to insinuate that the Queen was actually receiving a lover, while he makes out a case of innocence and positively merciful virtue that would melt a heart of stone.