and they all fled like a herd of fawns when a
wolf breaks from the oleander bushes. Then
the architect, looking up smilingly at the
clotted snow, hanging in bosses and tufts,
cells and pendants, fell on his knees, and
thanked Allah for so graciously answering
his prayer. This roof (you will find the
story in the Arabian Nights, or somewhere
else) was fashioned from the melting roof of
a snow-drift—it suggests delicious coolness—
and the soft fretted hollows of half-thawed
snow, flung up to the roof by playful hands,
and modelled ere it fell.

But what shall we say about the colour as
it exists? Is it emeraldine, like humming-
birds' wings, or plaited flowers? No, we
must tell the sober truth. To call a rose a
tulip is no pleasure to our mind. The
colour is dim and faded; buried under white
flaky icicles of accursed whitewash, or blurred
and besmirched as a dead butterfly's plumes.
Here and there are revived bright scraps of
azure, gold, and vermilion; but generally, it is
dull of outline, and dim as a washed-out
signpost. It is not a bit like the hard, opaque,
staring red and blue colour you see in Mr.
Owen Jones's, at the Crystal Palace—and it
never was like that, I am thinking. Blue
predominates; red and yellow are subordinated
in geometric traceries of starred and
crystalline harmonies. The walls are like pages
of illuminated missals, framed by cornices
of poem and prayer. Where the Spaniards
coarsely imitate the Moorish work, the
debased greens and purples obtrude, and
show how inferior in decorative art
civilisation is to instinct. The dados, or low
wainscotings, are of square glazed tiles,
which form a glittering breast-high coat
of mail up to the lower third of the palace
walls. Here the colours are the same as
those of the old Majolica china: the Raphael
ware, which originated in the East, and may
be seen now in any London curiosity shop
window. The dyes are the same—orange-
purple, dull sap-green and a reddish-
brown. Sometimes these Azuljo tiles, with
their low-toned enamel colours, are formed
into pillars, or pave the floors in squares
of fleurs-de-lis, or heraldic emblems, the
willow-pattern blue predominating. The
low, deep, shadow tone of these tile
wainscots seems to me quite to disprove Mr. Owen
Jones's staring vermilions and opaque blues.
In a country where the sun is solid fire, the
Arabs wanted shade; and, in these dados,
colour is seen in the shade, such as you find in
their Turkey carpets, deep, soft, and subdued.
They did not want the red and blue stripes
you see on child's peppermint. Mr. Jones will
have it, too, that all the hundred and twenty-
eight pillars of white marble, eleven feet high,
that in sistery groups, as of hewn ice, support
the pavilions and porticos of the Court of
Lions, were originally of a flaming gilt. Only
imagine the Moors cowering under windowless
roofs and domes, which were perpetual
caves of scented shadow, looking out on a
fountained garden, barred in with burning
pillars of burnished brass! These would
have scorched their eyes out. There is, in
fact, no trace of gold on the pillars,—no
shining streak or dull spot, or single dot of
glitter. And, to prove our case still more,
the ornaments of their strange basket-work
blocked out capitals, are of white ornaments
on a blue ground; the blue, the blue of
the salvia flower: the white leafy tracery,
the white surface of the original marble.
Sometimes it is red with blue leaves, or
blue on white with gilt bands and perpetual
pious ejaculations of "Blessing! There
is no conqueror but God!" Mr. Jones may
say that white too is blinding; but, marble
exposed to the air soon grows of a soft mellow
cream colour. These phylactery sentences
everywhere on the walls are traces of a custom
that the Chinese still retain. When one or
two lines perpetually stare at you from a
wall, the effect would become wearisome, or
else the sentences would soon altogether
cease to catch the eye or rouse the mind.
Just as old Montaigne, talking of habit, says,
in his quaint Gascon way, that after a day
or two he ceases to smell his perfumed
pounced leather doublet, therefore, what
use was it? A dreadful argument upon
the wearisomeness of repetitions. But these
geometric Cufic letters crying aloud from
the walls of God's greatness, goodness, and
power; of the builder's magnificence; of the
Sultan's splendour, are so countless, harmonious,
and interweaving—producing such
cross-lights of poetry and praise, and sink,
when the mind is torpid or indifferent to
them, naturally and gracefully into mere
surface ornament—that they are never out of
place; but always an unsatiating charm.
The long broken-shaped African letters wed
to the Arabic scrolled writing, which is a
later and more current hand; the one, like
the Roman, originated in stone inscriptions
before men wrote much anywhere but on
great men's tombs; the other, in parchment
scrolls of physicians and Aristotle commentators.
They both, though dumb to us, have
a strange enchanted look to the Feringhee
stranger.

There has been a great deal of dull disputation
about the Alhambra, now ended, though
it never should have begun. For instance,
on each side of the ante-room of the Hall of
the Ambassadors are two high cupboard-
looking recesses, or niches, like the piscinas
of our country churches. Blundering wise
men would have it, that this was where the
attendants put their slippers before entering
to an audience, till an Arabic scholar coolly
pointed to an angular inscription round the
aperture, which said, "If anyone approach
me complaining of thirst, he will receive
cool and limpid water, sweet and without
mixture." Any Spaniard ought to have
known that here was where the Alearaza, or