Our first care was to request a cicerone to take us to a casa de pupilos,—that is, a private house in which boarders are received, for, as it was our intention to remain some time at Granada, the mediocre hospitality of the Fonda del Comercio was far from calculated to promote our comfort during a long sojourn. This cicerone, of the name of Louis, was a Frenchman, and came from Farmoutiers in Brie. He had deserted during the French invasion under Bonaparte, and had lived at Granada for twenty years. He was the most comical figure imaginable: his height—he was five feet eight—contrasted most singularly with his little head, which was as wrinkled as a shrivelled apple and about as large as your fist. Being deprived of all communication with France, he had preserved his Brie jargon in all its native purity, spoke like an Opéra Comique Jeannot, and seemed to be perpetually reciting the words of Monsieur Etienne. In spite of so long a sojourn, his thick head had refused to stock itself with a single new idiom: he was hardly acquainted with the most indispensable phrases. The only things Spanish he had about him were the alpargatas, and the little Andalusian hat with its turned-up brim. The fact, however, of being Spanish even to this extent sorely vexed him, and he revenged himself by showering on every Spaniard he met all sorts of injurious epithets—in his Brie jargon, be it understood, for Master Louis had a particular dread of hard blows, and took as much care of his skin as if it had been worth something.
He took us to a very respectable house, in the Calle de Parragas, near the Plazuela de San Antonio, and at a stone's throw from the Carrera del Darro. The mistress of this boarding-house had lived for a long time at Marseilles and spoke French, which circumstance immediately induced us to take up our abode there, as our vocabulary was still very limited.
They put us into a room on the ground floor: this room was whitewashed, and its entire furniture consisted of a rose of different colours in the middle of the ceiling, but then it had the advantage of opening into a patio, surrounded by white marble columns with Moorish capitals, procured, no doubt, at the demolition of some ancient Arabian palace. A little basin, with a jet of water in it, dug in the middle of the court, kept the whole place cool; an immense piece of esparto matting, which formed the tendido, let in a subdued light, and made the ground, paved and marked out into compartments with pebbles, glitter here and there, as if studded with shining stars.
It was in the patio that we took our meals, read, and lived. We used our room for hardly anything but to dress and sleep in. Were it not for the patio, an architectural arrangement which reminds you of the ancient Roman cavædium, the houses in Andalusia would not be inhabitable. The sort of hall which precedes it is generally paved with small pebble-stones of various colours, forming designs in rough mosaic-work, now representing vases of flowers, now soldiers and caltrops, or simply stating the time when the patio was constructed.
From the top of our abode, which was surmounted by a kind of mirador, we could perceive, above the summit of a hill standing out boldly on the blue sky, and through groups of trees, the massive towers of the Alhambra, clothed by the sun in deep red, fire-like tints. The view was rendered complete by two large cypresses placed in juxtaposition, and the dark points of which rose into the sky above the walls of red. These cypresses are never lost sight of: whether you are climbing the snow-streaked sides of the Mulhacen, or wandering about the Vega or the Sierra de Elvira, they are always to be perceived, dark and motionless in the mist of the blue or golden vapour with which the roofs of the houses appear, at a distance, to be enveloped.
Granada is built on three hills, at the end of the plain of the Vega: the Vermilion Towers—thus named on account of their colour (Torres Bermejas), and which are asserted to be of Roman or even Phœnician origin—occupy the first and the least elevated of these eminences; the Alhambra, which is in itself an entire city, covers the second and highest hill with its square towers, connected with one another by lofty walls and immense substructures, which form an enclosure containing gardens, woods, houses, and squares; the Albaycin is situated on the third hillock, which is separated from the others by a deep ravine choked with vegetation and full of cactuses, coloquintidas, pistachio-trees, pomegranate-trees, rose-bays, and tufts of flowers, and at the bottom of which flows the Darro, with the rapidity of an Alpine torrent. The Darro, which has gold in its stream, traverses the city now beneath the open sky, now under bridges so long that they rather merit the name of vaults, and joins itself in the Vega, at a little distance from the parade, to the Xenil which is contented with containing silver. The course of the torrent through the city is called Carrera del Darro, and a magnificent view is obtained from the balconies of those houses which border it. The Darro wears away its shores very much, and causes frequent slips of earth; there exists, in consequence, an old couplet, sung by children, which alludes to this mania for carrying everything away, and accounts for it in a peculiar manner. The following are the lines in question:—
"Darro tiene prometido
El casarse con Xenil
Y le ha de llevar en dote
Plaza Nueva y Zacatin,"