The Alcazar has witnessed the loves and crimes of three races of kings, and every one of its stones awakens some memory or holds some secret. After entering, you cross two or three rooms, in which there is nothing Arabian left except the ceiling and some mosaics upon the walls, and find yourself in a court that strikes you dumb with wonder. A gallery composed of elegant arches supported by small marble columns arranged in pairs runs along the four sides. The arches, walls, windows and doors are covered with mosaics, carvings and arabesques. The latter are delicate and intricate, in some places perforated like a veil, in others thick and close as woven carpets and elsewhere again hanging and jutting out like garlands and bunches of flowers. With the exception of the brilliantly coloured decorations everything is as white, clean and glistening as ivory. Four large doors, one in each side, lead into the royal rooms. Here you no longer wonder; you are enchanted. Every thing that the most ardent fancy could imagine in the way of wealth and splendour is to be found in these rooms. From the ceiling to the floor, around the doors, around the windows in the distant recesses, wherever the eye may please to wander, such a multitude of gold ornaments and precious stones, such a close network of arabesques and inscriptions, such a marvellous blending of designs and colours appear that, before you have gone twenty steps, you are overpowered and confused, and you glance here and there as if trying to find a piece of bare wall upon which to rest your eye.
THE ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE, SPAIN.
In one of the rooms, the custodian pointed out a reddish spot upon the marble pavement, and said very solemnly:
This is the stain caused by the blood of Don Fadrique, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, who was killed here in the year 1358, by the order of the King Don Pedro, his brother.
When I heard this, I remember looking at the custodian as if to say: “Let us move on,” and the good man answered dryly:
“Caballero, if I were to tell you to believe this on my word you would be perfectly right to doubt it; but when you see the thing with your own eyes, it seems to me—I may be mistaken,—but——”
“Yes,” I hastily replied, “yes it is blood, I have no doubt of it; but don’t let us talk about it any more.”
Even if you are able to joke about a spot of blood, you cannot do so about the story of the crime. The place awoke in my mind all the most horrible facts. I seemed to hear Don Fadrique’s step echoing through these gilded rooms, as he was being pursued by the soldiers armed with clubs. The palace is shrouded in darkness; no noises are heard but those of the executioners and their victim. Don Fadrique tries to enter the court. Lopez de Padilla seizes him and he breaks away. Now he is in the court; he grasps his sword; he utters maledictions upon it for the cross of the hilt is entangled in the mantle of the Order of Santiago. Now the archers arrive; he cannot draw it from its sheath; he flies hither and thither as best he may. Fernandez de Roa overtakes him and fells him with a blow from his mace; the others approach and wound him and he expires in a pool of blood.
This sad memory soon vanishes amidst the thousand fancies of the delicious life of the Moorish kings. These lovely little windows at which the dreamy face of an Odalisk ought to appear at any moment; these secret doors before which you pause, despite yourself, as if you heard the rustling of a dress; these sleeping-rooms of princes enveloped in a mysterious gloom, where you fancy you hear the sighing of girls who lost in them their virginal purity; and the prodigious variety of colours and friezes resembling an ever-changing symphony excite your senses to such a degree that you are like one in a dream. The delicate and very light architecture, the little columns (which suggest the arms of a woman), the capricious arches, and the ceilings covered with ornaments that hang in the form of stalactites, icicles, and bunches of grapes,—all rouse in you the desire to seat yourself in the centre of one of these rooms, pressing to your heart a beautiful dark Andalusian head which will make you forget the world and lose all sense of time, and with one long kiss that drinks away your life, put you to sleep forever.