commandments of Islam,—to fast, give alms,
to smite the Infidel, make pilgrimages to
Mecca, and perform purifications. But the
keenest of all steps in, and says it is only
the old Roman talisman against the Evil
Eye, such as we see in coral on Neapolitan
lockets: the evil eye is specially dreaded
by the Spaniards even now, their cathedral-
towers being generally left unfinished, to
ward off such malign influences.

Over the inner arch is a sculptured key,
which critics, who always agree, decide was
a badge of honour, and an emblem of the
Prophet's power, like St. Peter, to open Hell
or Heaven's gates. Our keen man, however,
again stepping in, pushes by the crossed
swords of controversy, and says the key was
an old Cufic emblem, intimating Allah's
power to open the hearts of true believers.
It was a badge on the Almohades' banners,
and is seen in many Moorish castles. There
was an old legend before the Conquest, that
the Christians would never take this red
castle till the outer hand gripped the inner
key: a story something like the old
prophecy of evil to London when the dragon on
Bow steeple met with the grasshopper of
the Exchange; a meeting, which after the fire
at Gresham's building, really took place, but
without producing any special earthquake,
or even raising the price of turtle soup.

I pass through the strong gates, now
unwarded from the Infidel; pass the silent
guard-room, where an old woman knits
under the supposed miraculous picture of the
Virgin, painted by Saint Luke, file up an
enclosed lane—a sort of valley between fortress
walls—and enter a space, under which are the
old Moorish cisterns, which the donkeys that
toil up for the water from the low town of
Granada have special reasons to curse. I
cast a hasty look at the burnt brown giant
stones that were heaped up by Charles the
Fifth, to form his never-finished palace which
the earthquake (felt again only the other
day in Seville) frightened him out of—and
I run up the Torre de Vela, to see the magical
bell that peasant girls use still for their
love incantations, and read the inscription
relating, with all the exultant freshness of
recent conquest, how Cardinal Mendoza,
the night of the surrender, waved upon
this tower, the flag of Leon and
Castille, crying, con altas voces (with a loud
voice), "Granada, Granada is taken!" I see
the distant Sierra of Alhama, the gorge of
Loja, the spot where Columbus turned back
recalled by the messenger of tardily repenting
Isabella, the old Roman Illiberis, the
rocky defile of Moclin, the chains of Jaen,
the mountains where the mules brought the
snow for the Sultan's sherbet from, and the
gate where the brave Moorish Decius, seeing
the city was lost, sallied, as Irving tells us,
to die in the camp of the Spaniard.

I pass through the obscure door that leads
to the Court of the Fish-pond, repeating the
verse of the Arab poet: "This is a palace
of transparent crystal; those who look at it
imagine it to be the ocean. My pillars were
brought from Eden, my garden is the garden
of paradise. Of hewn jewels are my walls,
and my ceilings are dyed with the hues of
the wings of angels. I was paved with
petrified flowers, and those who see me
laugh and sing. The columns are blocks of
pearl by night, by day perpetual sunshine
turns the fountain to trickling gold."

I left behind me a burning town; I
passed through English plantations to a
convicts' prison, a deserted palace, an unguarded
fortress. Now I pass through a rude door,
and up some steps, and am in the palace
of Haroun; Granada changes to Damascus.
The Moorish arches, with their slender
palm-tree shafts, rise round me, the walls
are no longer stone ramparts, but pierced
trellises, that turn sunshine and moonshine
into patterns, and seem like so much Venetian
filagree. Surely they are needlework turned
to stone, or some great Sultan has built them
with panels cut from caskets of Indian ivory,
though the piecing be not seen. The myrtles
grow green and glossy round the great
marble tank chest, one hundred and fifty feet
long, which flows with mellow water, in
which burnished fish—some apparently red-
hot, others of pliant silver—steer, flirt,
skim, and splash. Never stop to think that
the dry, whity-brown, tubular-tiled, sloping
roofs ought to be flat, and are not now
Moorish. Do not stop to imagine the pierced
marble balustrade that once walled in this
bathing-place of the dark-skinned people;
nor picture glowing Bathsebas,—Rubens'
group of floating and laughing Sultanas,
with female black slaves watching their
innocent Diana gambols from corner stations
under the shady portico. Air and water are
the perpetual treasures of this place, and I
tasted them both gratefully as I strode under
the pointed arches, away from the burning
lashes of the sun that drove me under cover.
Beyond where the fountain bubbles like a
singing slave (whose language I can only
decipher as perpetual lamentation for the
exiled Moor), I pass through the
oblong Hall of Blessing, which is still as
radiant with colours as the edge of fading
evening cloud, and where the cornices of
inscriptions sing to the praise of some long
dead Sultan, who conquered twenty fortresses,
whose excellence ran clear through his
great deeds, like "the transparent silk thread
that joins a necklace of pearls." I learn from
the rivers of poems that fret the wall, that
this unknown dead warrior made the very
stars quiver in heaven, yet guarded the
tender branch of the young fig-tree from
harm. I learn that the stars shook when
he stamped, yet that the boughs of the
willow bent before him in adoration.

Now I enter—intoxicated with the fragile
yet imperishable beauty of the palace—the