and climb. I observe that as Seville is
duller and more monastic than Cadiz, so
Granada is more lifeless than Seville, which
is its hated rival. There are no jaunty
majos; the women are not flitting about,
but slouch along, instead of stepping like
deer; the houses are poorer, the streets
narrower; the exquisite grated doors of iron
filagree have thickened to jealous and
suspicious-looking wood; the courtyards are
smaller, and less palpably Roman; the
balconies seem less places of gathering and of
gossip; there are fewer marble pillars and
bananas; no diligences jingle and jumble
at the doors. I ask the way to the Alhambra
of a tinker who is soldering a kettle under a
wall in the open air. He says: "It is only
a casa de ratones" (a rat-hole).

A Spaniard, not yet forgetting the old
quarrel, cannot understand why you want
to see an old Moorish ruin. The smart new
casino in the Bull Plaza Street is something;
but that old kennel—bah!

What contempt the man who has been a
day in a place has for the man who has just
arrived! Just as I left the fonda I spied an
Englishman arrive, and instantly set out to
scale the Tarpeian rock, for fear of being
obliged to share in his crude view of the
Moorish city of Boabdil. The last traveller
I had met had a genius for contradiction,
and a passion for discovering in every
place a resemblance to Constantinople; so I
thought I would be more cautious this time,
and be off with my superior wisdom of
one day.

I expected a few olives, or some dusty-
leaved vegetables, as I passed a lolling group
of thirsty soldiers seated at the Horseshoe
gateway, and entered the Alhambra
precincts. I rubbed my eyes. Was I already
in Fairyland? Why, it was an English park
—a great sloping hill-growth of spindly,
wispy elms: real English elms, tall and
broomy,—run to seed, as it were, from over
heat, perpetual irrigation, and want of thinning.
Delicious green roofs they formed
against those arrowy sunbeams, but no more
in keeping with the old Moorish palace than
Bolton Abbey woods would be with the
Pyramids. No wonder they form the special
pride of favoured Granada, that sweats
up the hill to get cool under its shade, and
listen to the nightingales, who, like the souls
of dead Moorish women, sing all the noon-
day long, in this English bramble-chained
wood. But, why English? Why, simply
because this wood was the present of the
Iron Duke, who had the estate of Soto de
Roma, with its four thousand once pheasant-
haunted acres given him reluctantly by the
grateful Ferdinand the Seventh, and who
sent out these spindly elms, now spoiled by
ill-culture, from England. There is a breezy
stir amongst them as I pass. I think they
know I am an Englishman, and want to ask
me about their kindred; but I don't know
the tree language; and I am in a feverish
hurry to see the house the Moors built and
coloured for Time to make a meal of.

But still as I toil for the great wooden
cross Cardinal Mendoza set up, and the
ugly fountain beyond, I turn to look down
delighted through the hundred yards or
two of cool shaded walk, at the great
yellow glare of the street beyond, seen
through the Horse-shoe entrance-gate. It is
the Valley of the Shadow of Death and
Bunyan's Bright City conjoined into one. I
go on and on, turning to the left, by a half-
ruined tower, at the foot of which is a fonda,
where some red-faced men from Gib are
frothing up recurrent glasses of beer, and
discussing Irving's Legends of Giant Moors,
pass round a garden-walk at the foot of
the wall, and reach the grand entrance,
the Gate of Judgment, where, like Job
or Samuel, the Sultan, or Cadi, sat and
judged, grave in his green turban. Ever
since thirteen hundred and seventy-eight
that inscription of Yusuf, the founder, has
been there over the inner doorway: "May
Allah make this gate a protecting bulwark,
and write down its erection among the
imperishable actions of the just." The sons of
Islam wrote over the inner brick doorway
the name (which still remains there) of the
warlike and just Sultan Aboolwalid, Abn
Maser, the Commander of the Moslems of
Granada; and, as the inscription in the long-
barred Cufic letters tell us, the door was closed
for the first time in May, the month of the birth
of the Prophet, when all the almond-trees in
the Alhambra and gardens must have been
in a tender pink bloom, when the white
scented flower was on the orange, and the
blood-red blossoms on the pomegranate.
This was one of the four entrances to the old
fortress. The others were: the Tower of the
Seven Stories, through which Boabdil the
Unfortunate went out, and which, as being
unlucky, was afterwards walled up; the Tower
of the Catholic Kings; and the Armoury
Tower; all built of tenacious concrete, the
doorway-jambs being of white marble, close-
grained and crystalline, and the omega-
arches of the bygone race, moulded of sharp
red brick. I pass through the winding
passages between the two arches, intended to
make them stronger for defence, in case of a
rush of spearmen—who by these angles would
be broken into detail and chopped up in
detachments—and observe the blind beggars,
who chatter perpetually of their infirmity,
underneath the tawdry painting of a Virgin,
covered with a sort of dairy-grating of wire,
such as you put over meat in hot weather.
Over that curious horse-shoe arch is a quaint
open hand, carved, which has a talismanic and
Arabian Night effect. Some say it typifies
the hand of God, the symbol of power and
providence; other mental spiders, who
rejoice in spinning out fine silken threads of
fancy, suppose it to be a type of the five