Hall of the Ambassadors, the golden saloon,
with a dome which bursts like a flower-bell
sixty feet high up, is the Tower of Comares.
An ingenious friend of mine, clever at
theorising (which is a sort of mental tightrope
dancing), thinks the Moorish dome
was suggested by the scooped out half
of a melon: a theory which I cap by
deriving the scalloped edge of the engrailed
arches from the jagged edge of the aloe's
leaf. In sober truth, I do not think much of
any fanciful architectural theories, believing
that sober, drudging necessity suggested
architectural shapes, and that ornament was
quite a superadded subsequent luxury. We
first get our shirt, and then we put on the
ruffles. We first roof ourselves in, and then
go on refining about the shape of the
windows.

The most beautiful thing about these
Moorish domes is—not their grand poise and
balance, or the spontaneity of their spring—
but the airiness of them. They seem mere
resting clouds swelling round you and canopying
you with colour. You have no sense of
their weight or means of permanency. The
stalactite ornament, too, as it is called, seems
fashioned in emulous rivalry of prisoned,
golden-celled honey-comb, in which honey
still rests; honey, dyed by the juices of the
flowers from which it has been drawn.

I go into the Sala of the Two Sisters; so
called from two gigantic sister slabs of
Macael marble, which pave the centre of the
floor. I crick my neck with looking up, and
let my eye soar upward and flutter like
a bird in and out of those flower-cup
cells; which seem the first creative types of
some fresh world of fairy blossoming. A
severe scientific American from "Bawst'n"
will insist on telling me that the thing is
very simple: it is a beauty put together
by mere receipt. Those coloured cells, so
shapeless yet so harmonious, are mere
prisms, united by their contiguous lateral
surfaces, consisting of seven different forms,
proceeding from three primary figures;—
the right-angled triangle, the rectangle, and
the isosceles triangle. These components
are capable of millions of combinations,
just like the three primitive colours, or the
seven notes of the musical scale. A simple
receipt; yet no one can, now-a-days, cook
anything like it. And grand, too, to think
of the old artist, sitting down with his
palette of changes on his thumb, with
three primary triangles, and three primary
colours, producing in this one conical,
helmeted roof alone, with his reeds and plaster,
an almost eternal sheltering of beauty, and
some five thousand prismatic changes! "The
carpentry of these roofs is tarnation 'cutely
done," says my friend Spry, "and was derived
by the Moors from the Phœnicians and
Egyptians." (This is the vermilion roof
mentioned by Jeremiah.) "But you should see
the town-hall at Bawst'n!"

The Moors had a keen sensual sense of the
necessities of climate. They were always
thinking of the Arab tent. They wanted air
and lightness. These marble pillars are the
tent-spears grown to stone. This network
lace veil that filagrees every wall with
cobwebs of harmonious colour, is the old tent
tapestry, the Cordovan stamped leather
hangings, the Indian shawls that canopied
the wandering and victorious horseman's
tent. They did not want the Titan-dome of
the Pantheon, or the great metal bell that
hollows over Saint Peter's; they wanted mere
pendant flowers woven together into roof
and gossamer-pierced panels, that hardly
arrest the air. Everything must float and
sway; they would not bar out the chirp of the
dripping silver water in the garden-court
without.

The pillars, they thinned and shaved till
they were no longer round blocks of rock;
but mere banded flower-stalks, or young
palm-trees, slender as spear-shafts. The
spandrils are not corbelled beams, faced
with figure-head monsters, but perforated
props, as to some princess's cabinet. They
have no Samson pillars that bear up the
Atlas-load, and that, if falling, would bring
down roof-tree and bower, in one common
destruction. There is nothing to hold
up, only ivory-patterned walls, and a
honey-combed dome that floats in the hot air.
As for the ornamentation—away with your
Arabic Euclids and triangles! It was
thus devised. The great architect, Ibn Aser,
had roofed out the burning blue sky and
the lightning heat with a plain bell-dome,
after the manner of the Romans; but his
soul was not satisfied, and he sat
cross-legged on his prayer-carpet between the
palm-pillars, looking up, and praying to
Allah for more light of divine wisdom. At
that moment came dancing in, with shell-
shaped castanets, calabash guitars, Moorish
cymbals, and the nose-flutes of Barbary, a
band of Christian and negro slaves, waiting
for their fair mistress, Nourmahal, the light
of the world. Wanton in their joy, they
flung about their arms, which, mingling
together black and white, looked like night,
just when it is changing into day. They
began to pelt each other with handfuls
of snow, which lay there in huge matted
baskets, brought that morning on mules from
the bosom-clefts of the Sierra Nevada; and
the snow on the black faces fell as swan's-
down, but on the fairer faces it was as ice-
dew on the early roses. Then, tired of this
amusement, they began to toss hundreds of
snow-balls aloft up at the domed roof, seeing
which of them could make most snow adhere
to the hollow globe; and when one obtained
the victory, she laughed with a laugh that
was as a peal of silver bells. Then came the
loud clapping of a black eunuch's hands, the
signal that Nourmahal needed their services
with perfumes and syrups in the bath-room,