GRANADA UNDERTAKER.GRANADA UNDERTAKER.
THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA.THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA.
Granada rests in what might pass for the Happy Valley of Rasselas, a deep stretch of thirty miles, called simply the Vega, and tilled from end to end on a system of irrigation established by the Moslem conquerors. Rugged mountains, bastions of a more than Cyclopean earthwork,girdle and defend it. To penetrate them you must leave the hot rolling lands of the west, and confront steep heights niched here and there for creamy-hued villages or deserted castles, and sentried by small Moorish watch-towers rising like chessmen on the highest crests. The olive-trees spread on wide slopes of tanned earth were like thick dotsof black connected in one design, and seemed to suggest the possible origin of Spanish lace. The shapes of the mountains, too, were extravagant. One of the most singular, thePeñon de los Enamorados, near Antequera, showed us by accident at a distance the exact profile of George Washington, with every detail after Stuart, hewn out in mountain size and looking directly up into the heavens from a position of supine rigidity. Our first intimation of a near approach to Granada was a long stretch of blanched folds showing through evening mistiness in the southern sky, like the drapings of some celestial tabernacle, so high up that they might have been clouds but for a certain persistent, awful immobility that controlled them. Their spectral whiteness, detached from the earth, hung, it is true, ten thousand feet above the sea-level; but they were not clouds. They were the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the great Snowy Range.
Twenty miles to the north of these frosty heights stands the Alhambra Hill, shrouded in dark trees, and dominated by the Mountain of the Sun. The names are significant—Snowy Range and Mountain of the Sun—for the landscape that unrolls itself between these ridges is a mixture of torrid glow and Alpine coldness. I stood in a hanging garden delicious with aromatic growths, on the ramparts beside the great Lookout Tower, the city lying like a calcareous deposit packed in the gorge of the Darro's stream below. Across the Vega I beheld that sandy pass of the hills through which Boabdil withdrew after his surrender—the Last Sigh of the Moor. Fierce sunlight smote upon me, spattering the leaves like metal in flux; but the snow-fields mantling the blue wall of the Sierra loomed over the landscape so distinct as to seem within easy hail, and I felt their breath in a sweet coolness that drifted by from time to time. The other mountains were bare and golden brown. But in their midst the mild Vega, inlaid with curves of the River Genil, receded in breadths of alternate green orchard and mellow rye, where distant villages are scattered "like white antelopes at pasture," says Señor Don Contreras, the accomplished curator of the Alhambra. It was not like a dream, for dreams are imitative; nor like reality, for that is too unstable. It was blended of both these, with a purely ideal strand. As I looked at the rusty red walls and abraded towers palisading the hill, the surroundings became like some miraculous web, and these ruins, concentring the threads, were the shattered cocoon from which it had been spun.
The Alhambra was originally a village on the height, perhaps the first local settlement, surrounded by a wall for defensive purposes.
A WATER-CARRIER.A WATER-CARRIER.
The wall, which once united a system of thirty-seven towers, fringes the irregular edges of the hill-top plateau, describing an enclosure like a rude crescent lying east and west. At the west end the hill contracts to an anvil point, and on this are grouped the works of the citadel Alcazaba, governed by the huge square Lookout Tower. On a ridge close to the south stand the Vermilion Towers, suspected of having been mixed up with the Phœnicians at an early epoch, but not yet fully convicted by the antiquarians. The intervening glade receives a steep road from the city, and is arcaded with elms and cherries of prodigious size, sent over as saplings by the Duke of Wellington half a century ago. There the nightingales sing in spring-time, and in summer the boughs give perch to other songsters. Ramps lead up to the top of the hill, and on the northern edge of its crescent, at the brink of the Darro Valley, the Alhambra Palace proper is lodged.
We shall go in by the Gate of Justice, through a door-way running up two-thirds of its tower's height, and culminating in a little horseshoe arch, whereon a rude hand is incised—a favorite Mohammedan symbol of doctrine. We pass a poor pictured oratory of the Virgin, and some lance-rests of Ferdinand V., to worm our way through the grim passage that cautiously turns twice before emerging through an arch of pointed brick with enamellings on argil, into the open gravelled Place of the Reservoirs. This is undermined by a fettered lake, generally attributed to the Moors, but more probably made after Isabella's conquest. On the right side, behind hedges and low trees, is reared that gray rectangular Græco-Roman pile which Charles V. had the audacity to begin. His palace is deservedly unfinished, yet its intrusion is effective. It makes you think of the terror-striking helmet of unearthly size in the Castle of Otranto, and looks indeed like a piece of mediæval armor flung down here to challenge vainly the wise Arabian beauty of the older edifice. To the Place of Reservoirs come in uninterrupted course all day the tinkling and tasselled mules that carry back to the city jars of fresh water, kept cool in baskets filled with leaves. And hither walk toward sunset themajosandmajas—dandies and coquettes—to stroll and gossip for an hour, even as we saw them when we were lingering at the northern parapet one evening and looking off through the clear air, in which a million rose-leaves seemed to have dipped and left their faint color.
THEveritable entrance to the Alhambra is now buried within some later buildings added to the original. But it never, though Irving naturally supposed the contrary, had a grand portal in the middle. Gorgeous and showy means of ingress would not have suited the Oriental mind. The exterior of the palace and all the towers is dull, blank, uncommunicative. Their coating of muddy or ferruginous cement, marked here and there by slim upright oblongs of black window spaces, was not meant to reveal the luxury of loveliness concealed within. The Moslem idea was to secrete the abodes of earthly bliss, nor even to hint at them by outward signs of ostentation.
So the petty modern door cut for convenience is not wholly out of keeping. It ushers one with a sudden surprise into the presence of those marvels which have been for years a distant enticing vision. You find yourself, in fact, wandering into the Alhambra courts as if by accident. The first one—the Court of the Pond, or of the Myrtles—arrays before us beauty enough and to spare. But it is only the beginning. A long tank occupies the centre, brimmed with water from a rill that gurgles, by day and night forever, with a low, half-laughing sob. Around it level plates of white marble are riveted to the ground, and two hedges of clipped myrtle border the placid surface. At the nearest end a double gallery closes the court, imposed on seven arches so evenly rounded as to emulate the Roman, but upheld by columns of amazing slenderness; and in the spandrels are translucent arabesques inlaced with fillets, radiating leaf-points, and loose knots. Above these blink some square windows, shut as with frozen gauze by minute stone lattice-work, over fifteen hundred twisted or cubed pieces being combined in each. From there the women of the harem used to witness pageantries and ceremonies that took place in the court; and over the veiled windows is a roofed balcony repeating the lower arches, which would serve for spectators not under ban of invisibility.
BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA. From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA.From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.
Various low doors lead from this Court of the Pond, giving sealed intimation of what may lie beyond, but disclosing little. One turns naturally, however, to the Hall of Ambassadors at the other end, in the mighty Tower of Comares. The transverse arcade at the entrance is roofed with shining vitreous-faced tiles of blue and white that also carrytheir stripes over the little cupola, to which many similar ones doubtless formerly surrounded the court, and in the cloister underneath the inmates reclined on divans glinting with rippled gold-thread and embroidered with colored silks. Then comes the anteroom, the Chamber of Benediction (usually called of the Boat, on account of its long, scooped ceiling), which is like the hollow of a capsized boat suspended over us, and darkened with deep lapis lazuli. There are some low doors in the wall, meant for the humble approach of slaves when serving their masters, or leading to lost inner corridors and stairways now fallen into dust. But the large central arch conducts at once into the Hall of the Ambassadors, after we have passed some niches in which of old were set encarmined water-jars of sweet-scented clay. Beside these may havestood the carven racks for weapons of jewelled hilt and tempered blade.
In the Chamber of Benediction begin those multitudinous arabesques by which the Alhambra is most widely known. In the hall beyond they flow out with unimpeded grace and variety over the walls of an immensely high and nobly spacious apartment, pierced on three sides at the floor level with archedajimez[8]windows halved by a thin, flower-headed column, in the embrasures of which, enchased with cement, are mouldings that overrun the groundwork in bands, curves, diamonds, scrolls, delicate as the ribs of leaves or as vine tendrils. Within these soft convolved lines, arranged to make the most florid detail tributary to the general effect, Arabic characters twisted into the design contain outbursts of poetry celebrating the edifice, the room itself. "As if I were the arc of the rainbow," says one inscription in the hooped door-way, "and the sun were Lord Abul Hachach." The windows look forth upon the sheer northern fall of the hill; the waving tree-tops scarcely rising to the balcony under the sills. They look upon old Granada dozing below in the unmitigated sunlight, with here and there the sculptured columns of apatiovisible among the houses on the opposite slope; and farther away the Sesame doors of gypsy habitations cut into the solid mountain above the Darro. One of the most beautiful of glimpses about the Alhambra is that through the east window, looking along the parapet gallery to the Toilet Tower. Precipitous masonry plunges down among trees that shoot incredibly high, as if incited by the lines of the building; and on the Mountain of the Sun the irregular lint-white buildings of the Generalife—an old retreat of Moorish sovereigns and nobles—are lodged among cypresses and orange thickets. Within the hall itself all is cool, subdued, and breezy, and the smooth vault of the larch-wood ceiling, still dimly rich with azure and gold, spans the area high overhead like a solemn twilight sky at night.
It was in this Tower of Comares that the last King of Granada, Boabdil, was imprisoned with his mother, Ayeshah, by his stormy and fatuous father, Muley Abul Hassan, owing to the rival influence of the Morning Star, Zoraya, Hassan's favorite wife. Boabdil escaped, being let down to the ground by the scarfs of his mother and her female attendants. Years after, when he had succeeded to the throne for a brief and hapless reign,El Rey Chico(The Little King), as the Spaniardscalled him, was led by his mother into the Hall of Ambassadors after he had capitulated to Ferdinand and Isabella. Silently she made its circuit with him, and then, overcome with the bitterness of loss, she cried: "Behold what thou art giving up, and remember that all thy forefathers died kings of Granada, but in thee the kingdom dies!"
THE TOILET TOWER. From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.THE TOILET TOWER.From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.
The Hall of Ambassadors is assigned to the epoch of the caliphate. Certainly the Court of Lions is invested with a somewhat different character. Its arches are more pointed, more nearly Gothic, and are hung upon a maze of exquisitely slight columns, presenting, as you look in,an opulent confusion of crinkled curves and wavering ellipses, bordered with dropping points and brief undulations that look like festoons of heavy petrified lace: as lace, heavy; but as architecture, light. There is incalculable diversity in the proportions, unevenness in the grouping of the pillars, irregularity in the cupolas; yet through all persists an unsurpassable harmony, a sensitive equilibrium. The Hall of Justice, which opens from it, and contains—contrary to Mohammedan principles—some mysterious early Italian frescoes depicting Moorish and Christian combats, is a grotto of stalactites. All this part of the palace, one would say, might have sprung from the spray of those hidden canals which brought the snow-water hither, spouting up, then falling and crystallizing in shapes of arrested motion; so perfect is the geometrical balance, so suave are the flowing lines. The un-Moorish lions sustaining the central basin are meagre and crude, and the size of the court is disappointing; but it is a miniature labyrinth of beauty. From one side you may pass into the Hall of the Abencerages, under the fine star-shaped roof of which a number of those purely Arab-blooded knights are said to have been, at the instigation of their half-Christian rivals, the Zegris, assembled at a banquet and then murdered. An invitation to dinner in those days was a doubtful compliment, which a gentleman had to think twice about before accepting.
On the other side lies the access to the Chamber of the Two Sisters, a lovely apartment, having a grooved bed in the marble floor for a current of water to course through and run out under the zigzag-carven cedar door. Everything is exactly as you would have it, and you seem to be straying through embodied reveries of Bagdad and Damascus. But it would be futile to describe the myriad traceries of these rooms; the bevelled entablatures, the elastic ceilings, displaying an order and multiplicity of tiny relief as systematic as the cells and tissues in a cut pomegranate; or the dadoes of colored tiles, still dimly glistening with glaze, and chameleonizing the base of the partitions. The culmination of microscopic refinement comes, with a sigh of relief from such an overplus of sensuous delight, in the boudoir of Lindaraxa, which overlooks from a superb embayed window a little oasis of fountained court, blooming with citrons and lemons, and bedded with violets. That small garden, green and laughing, and interspersed with dark flower-mould, lies clasped in the branching wings of masonry, as simple and refreshing as a dew-drop. It is shut in on the other side by some mediæval rooms fitted up in heavy oak panelling for Philip V. and his second bride, Elisabetta, when with rare judgment they chose this Islamiticspot for their honey-moon—a crescent, I suppose. It was in one of these rooms—the Room of the Fruits—that, to quote Señor Contreras again, "the celebrated poet Washington Irving harbored, composing there his best works." From which it will be inferred that the gallant Spaniard has not probed deeply the "Knickerbocker History of New York," the "Sketch-book," and the "Life of Washington."[9]
BOUDOIR OF LINDARAXABOUDOIR OF LINDARAXA
One may prolong one's explorations to the Queen's Toilet Tower—who "the queen" was remains decidedly vague—poised like a lofty palm on the verge commanding the Darro gorge. In one corner of its engirdling colonnade are some round punctures, through which perfume was wafted to saturate the queen's garments while she was dressing. Or one may descend to the Baths, vaulted in below the general level. Their antechamber is the only portion which has been completely restored to its pristine magnificence of blue and gold, vermilion-flecked and overspreading the polygonal facets of stucco-work. I could imagine the Sultan coming there with stately step to be robed for the bath by female slaves, then passing on wooden clogs into the inner chamber of heated marble, and at a due interval emerging to take his place on one of the inclined slabs in an outer alcove, enveloped in atcherchef—his head bound with a soft silk muffler—there to devote himself to rest, sweetmeats, and lazy conversation.
The Alhambra Palace is remarkable as being more Persian than Turkish, and reproducing many features that crop up in the architecture of India, Syria, Arabia, and Turkey, yet incorporating them in an independent total. The horseshoe arch is not the prevailing one, though it occurs often enough to renew and deepen the impression of its unique effect. What makes this arch so adroitly significant of the East? Possibly the fact that it suggests a bow bent to the extremest convexity. It is easy to imagine stretched between the opposite sides a bow-string—that handy implement of conjugal strangulation which no Sultan's family should be without.
Part of the populous ancient settlement on the hill still exists in asingle street outside of the palace, now inhabited by a more respectable population than that riffraff of silk-weavers, vagabonds, potters, smugglers, and broken-down soldiers who flourished there half a century since. A church stands among the dwellings. Strolling up the street one moonlit night, we bought some blue and white wine-pitchers of Granada-ware at a little drinking-shop, and saw farther on a big circle of some twenty people sitting together in the open air—one of those informal social clubs calledtertulias, common among neighbors and intimate friends in all ranks of Spanish society. At another spot a man was sleeping in the moonlight on a cot beside the parapet, with his two little Indian-looking boys dreaming on a sheet laid over the ground. Mateo Ximenes, the son of Irving's "Son of the Alhambra," lives in this quarter, officiating as a guide. Thanks to "Geoffrey Crayon" he is prosperous, and has accordingly built a new square house which is the acme of commonplace. Beyond the street, across some open ground where figs and prickly-pears are growing, stands the Tower of the Captive, where Isabella de Solis, a Christian princess, being captured, was imprisoned, and became the wife of Abul Hassan. She was, in fact, the Zoraya who became Ayeshah's rival. Dense ivy mats the wall between this and the Tower of the Princesses—a structure utilized by Irving in one of his prettiest tales. Both towers are incrusted interiorly with a perfection rivalling the palace chambers, and perhaps even more enchanting, but no vestige of coloring is left in them. To me this wan aspect of the walls is more poetic than any restoration of the original emblazonments. The pale white-brown surface seems compounded of historic ashes, and is imbued with a pathos,
"Like a picture when the prideOf its coloring hath died,"
"Like a picture when the prideOf its coloring hath died,"
which one would be loath to lose.
The sunlit and vine-clad decrepitude that sits so lightly on this magic stronghold—this "fortress and mansion of joy," as one of the mural mottoes calls it—is among its main charms. The most bitter opponent of any Moorish return to power in Granada would, I think, be the modern æsthetic tourist. I rambled frequently close under the old rufous-mottled walls, from which young trees sprout up lustily, and enjoyed their decay almost as much as I did the palace. At one point near the Tower of Seven Stories (which has never quite recovered from being blown up by the French) there was a long stretch of garden where phlox and larkspur and chrysanthemums, that would not wait for autumn,grew rank among the fruit-trees. A Moorish water-pipe near the top of the wall had broken, and, bursting through the brick-work, its current had formed a narrow cascade that tumbled into the garden through wavering loops of maiden-hair, and over mosses or water-plants which it had brought into life on the escarpment. Grapes and figs rose luxuriantly about rings of box enclosing fountains, and at sunset some shaft of fire would level itself into the greenery, striking the gorgeous pomegranate blossoms into prominence, like scarlet-tufted birds' heads. All day there was a loud chir of cicadas, and a rain of white-hot light sifted through the leaves. But at night everything died away except the rush of water, which grew louder and louder till it filled the whole air like a ghostly warning. I used to wake long after midnight, and hear nothing but this chilling whisper, unless by chance some gypsies squatted on the road were singingMalagueñas, or the strange, piercing note of the tree-toad that haunts the hill rung out in elfin and inhuman pipings of woe. For the builders who laid them here these running streams make a fit memorial—unstable as their power that has slipped away, yet surviving them, and remaining here as an echo of their voices, a reminder of the absent race which not for an hour can one forget in Granada.
But the supreme spell of the Alhambra reserves itself for moonlight. When the Madonna's lamp shone bright amid the ingulfing shadows of the Tower of Justice, while its upper half was cased in steely radiance, we passed in by Charles's Palace, where the moon, shining through the roofless top, made a row of smaller moons in the circular upper windows of the dark gray wall. In the Court of the Pond a low gourd-like umbellation at the north end sparkled in diamond lustre beneath the quivering rays; while the whole Tower of Comares behind it repeated itself in the gray-green water at our feet, with a twinkle of stars around its reversed summit. This image, dropped into the liquid depth, has dwelt there ever since its original was reared, and it somehow idealized itself into a picture of the tower's primitive perfection. The coldness of the moonlight on the soft cream-colored plaster, in this warm, stilly air, is peculiarly impressive. As for sound, absolutely none is heard but that of dripping water; nor did I ever walk through a profounder, more ghost-like silence than that which eddied in Lindaraxa's garden around the fountain, as it mourned in silvery monotones of neglected grief. The moon-glare, coming through the lonely arches, shaped gleaming cuirasses on the ground, or struck the out-thrust branches of citron-trees, and seemed to drip from them again in a dazzleof snowy fire; and when I discovered my two companions looking out unexpectedly from a pointed window, they were so pale in the brilliance which played over them that for a moment I easily fancied them white-stoled apparitions from the past. As we glanced from the Queen's Peinador, where the black trees of the shaggy ascent sprung toward us in swift lines or serpentine coilings as if to grasp at us, we saw long shadows from the towers thrown out over the sleeping city, which, far below, caked together its squares of hammered silver, dusked over by the dead gray of roofs that did not reflect the light. But within the Hall of Ambassadors reigned a gloom like that of the grave. Gleams of sharp radiance lay in the deep embrasures without penetrating; and, at one, the intricacies of open-work above the arch were mapped in clear figures of light on a space of jet-black floor. Another was filled nearly to the top by the blue, weirdly luminous image of a mountain across the valley. Through all these openings, I thought, the spirits of the departed could find entrance as easily as the footless night breeze. I wonder if the people who lived in this labyrinth of art ever smiled? In the palpitating dusk, robed men and veiled women seemed to steal by with a rustle no louder than that of their actual movement in life; silk hangings hung floating from the walls; scented lamps shed their beams at moments through the obscurity, and I saw the gleam of enamelled swords, the shine of bronze candlesticks, the blur of colored vases in the corners; thekasidasof which poetry-loving monarchs turned the pages. But in such a place I could not imagine laughter. I felt inclined to prostrate myself in the darkness before I know not what power of by-gone yet ever-present things—a half tangible essence that expressed only the solemnity of life and the presentiment of change.
ITis not surprising that Isabella the Catholic, who had so completely thrown her heart into the conquest of Granada, should have wished to be buried in that city, though dying far away. Her marble semblance rests beside that of Ferdinand in the Royal Chapel, which serves as vestibule to the ugly Renaissance cathedral. The statues are peculiarly impressive, and sleep on high sepulchres of alabaster, beautifully chased. Both of them are placed with their heads where, if sentient, they might contemplate the astonishing reredos of the altar—a wooden mass piled to the roof, and containing many niches filled by figurescarved, gilded, and painted with flesh-color. Among them is John the Baptist standing upright, with blood gushing from his severed neck, while the head which has just quitted it is being presented on a charger to Herodias's daughter. There are other hideous things in this strange and brutal church ornament, which is a museum of monstrosities; but parts of it depict the triumphs of the royal pair, and it was no doubt accordant with their taste. Their bodies lie in a black vault under the floor, which we visited by the light of a single candle. Two long bulks of lead, with a simple letter F. on one and an I. on the other; that was all that marked the presence of two great monarchs' earthly part. Juana the Mad, Charles V.'s mother, rests in another leaden casket—the poor Queen, whom her famous son probably reported crazy for his own political purposes, but whose supposed mania of watching her dead husband's body, in jealous fear that he could still be loved by other women, has been effectively treated in Padilla's picture. Her husband, Philip the Fair, lies on the opposite side. Hardly could there be a more impressive contrast than that between this tomb under the soft, musty shadows of the chapel—all that is left of the conqueror—and that glorious sun-imbued ruin on the hill—all that is left of the conquered. Two mighty forces met and clashed around Granada in 1492; and, when the victory was won, both receded like spent waves, leaving the Alhambra to slow burial in rubbish and oblivion, under which Washington Irving literally rediscovered it. How fine a coincidence that the very spot from which Isabella finally despatched Columbus on his great quest should owe so much to a son of the new continent which Columbus discovered!
Another edifice of no small interest, although seldom heard of at a distance, is La Cartuja, the Carthusian church and monastery, lying upon a hill-slope called Hinadamar, across the city and on its outskirts, due west from the Alhambra. The monks who formerly occupied it have, in common with those of other orders, been driven out of Spain; so that we approached the church-steps through an old arched gate-way, no longer guarded, and by way of a grass-grown enclosure that bore the appearance of complete neglect. The interior, however, is very well preserved. It was curious to walk through it, under the guidance of a pursy old woman, and, afterward, of the lame sacristan, who did his best with chattering gossip to rob the place of whatever sanctity remained to it. The refectory (fitly inhabited by an echo) stands bare and empty, save for the reading-desk, from which the monks used to be refreshed with Scripture while at their meals; and on the wall atone end of this long, high hall hangs apparently a wooden cross, which at first it is impossible to believe is only painted there. The barren, round-arched cloisters are frescoed with an interminable series of scenes by Cotan, the same artist who painted the cross; and in this case he was given a free commission, of which he availed himself to the utmost in depicting the most distressing incidents of Carthusian martyrology. Especially does he seem to have delighted in the persecutions inflicted by English Protestants under Henry VIII. on San Bruno, the founder of this order. How strange the conception of a holy and exalted life which led men in religious retirement to keep before their eyes, in these corridors meant for mild exercise and recreation, representations so full of blood and horror! In fact, one cannot escape the impression, stamped more vividly on the mind here in Granada than anywhere else, except perhaps in Toledo, that Christianity in Spain meant barbarism. But where it was released from the immediate purposes of ecclesiastic dogma, Christian art showed a taste not so much barbarous as barbaric, and the results of its activity were often beautiful. In this same monastery is a splendid example of that tendency. The church is not remarkably fine or impressive; but the sacristy is a marvel of sumptuous decoration, and decoration very peculiar in kind. Its walls are wholly incased in a most effective species of green and white marble, cut in smooth, polished slabs, the natural veinings of which present grotesque resemblances to human and other forms, which are somewhat trivially insisted upon by the custodian and guide, and should be allowed to lose themselves in the general richness of aspect. The great doors of this sacristy are inlaid with ebony, silver, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell, in designs of much intricacy and richness; and all around the room (which is provided with an altar, so that it becomes a sort of sub-church or chapel, adjoining the main church) are low closets fitted into the wall. These were originally used for holding the vestments of the brotherhood. Made of sweet-scented cedar, they are adorned on the outside with the same inlaid work that appears on the doors. The dim, veiled shimmer of the mother-of-pearl, the delicate, translucent browns of the tortoise-shell, and the wandering threads of silver, form a decorative surface wonderful in its refinement, its perfection of elegance. I scarcely know how to give an idea of its appearance, unless I say that it was somewhat as if layers of spider-webs had been spread, with all their mystery of exact curves and angles, over the wood-work, and then had had their fibres changed by some magic into precious and enduring materials. The frail but well-adjusted fabric has outlastedthe dominion of those for whose selfish and secluded pride of worship it was made; and, seeing it, one may pardon them some of their mistakes. It is pleasant also to find that the art of making this inlay, after having long fallen out of use, has been revived in Granada; for in these days of enlightened adaptation and artistic education there seems to be no reason why such a handicraft should be lost or even confined to Spain.
The gypsies of Granada are disappointing, apart from their peculiar quivering dance, performed bygitanasin all Spanish cities under the name offlamenco.[10]Their hill-caves, so operative with one's curiosity when regarded from across the valley, gape open in such dingy, sour, degraded foulness on a nearer view, that I found no amount of theory would avail to restore their interest. Yet some of the fortune-telling women are spirited enough, and the inextinguishable Romany spark smoulders in their black eyes. Perhaps it was an interloping drop of Celtic blood that made one of them say to me, "Señorito, listen. I will tell you your fortune. But I speak French—I come from Africa!" And to clinch the matter she added, "You needn't pay me if every word of the prediction isn't true!" Much as I had heard of the Spanish bull, I never knew until then how closely it resembled the Irish breed.
Fortuny's model, Marinero, who lives in a burrow on the Alhambra side, occasionally starts up out of the earth in a superb and expensive costume, due to the dignity of his having been painted by Fortuny. Dark as a negro, with a degree of luminous brown in his skin, and very handsome, he plants himself immovably in one spot to sell photographs of himself. His nostrils visibly dilate with pride, but he makes no other bid for custom. He expands his haughty nose, and you immediately buy a picture. Velveteen chanced upon Marinero's daughter, and got her to pose. When he engaged her she was so delighted that she took a rose from her hair and presented it to him, with a charming, unaffected air of gratitude, came an hour before the time, and waited impatiently. She wore a wine-colored skirt, if I remember, a violet jacket braided with black, and a silk neckerchief of dull purple-pink silk. But that was not enough: a blue silk kerchief also was wound about her waist, and in among her smooth jet locks she had tucked a vivid scarlet flower. The result was perfect, for the rich pale-brown ofher complexion could harmonize anything; and in Spain, moreover, combinations of color that appear too harsh elsewhere are paled and softened by the overpowering light.
GYPSIES.GYPSIES.
Episodes like these tinged our dreams of the Alhambra with novel dashes of living reality. Even the tedious bustle of a Spanish town, too, has its attractions. The moving figures on the steep Albaycin streets, that perpetually break into flights of steps; the blocks of pressed snow brought in mule panniers every night from the Sierra to cool sugar-water and risadas of orange at the cafés; peasants coming in to the beautiful old grain market with gaudy mantles over their shoulders, stuffing into their sashes a variety of purchases, and becoming corpulent with a day's transactions; the patient efforts of shop-keepersto water the main street, Zacatin, with a pailful at a time—all this was amusing to watch. The Generalife was another source of pleasure, for in its topmost loggia one may sit like a bird, with the Alhambra spread out below in all the distinctness of a raised map. In the saloons of the Generalife hang the portraits of the Moorish and the Christian ancestors of the present owner. Their direct descendant is a woman; therefore she has married an Italian count, and flitted from this ideal, quite unparalleled eyry, returning to her ancestral home only at rare intervals.
There came an hour when we too flitted. To oblige an eccentric time-table we had to get up at dawn; but the last glimpse of the Alhambra at that early hour was a compensation. The dim red towers already began to soften into a reminiscence under this tender blending of moonlight and morning; but a small constellation in the east sparkled on the blue like a necklace of diamonds, and Saturn still flamed above the mountains, growing momently larger, as if it were a huge topaz in the turban of some giant Moor advancing in the early stillness to reclaim the Alhambra throne.
A gypsydance!What does one naturally imagine it to be like? For my part, I had expected something wild, free, and fantastic; something in harmony with moonlight, the ragged shadows of trees, and the flicker of a rude camp-fire. Nothing could have been wider of the mark. Theflamenco—that dance of the gypsies, in its way as peculiarly Spanish as the church and the bull-ring, and hardly less important—is of Oriental origin, and preserves the impassive quality, the suppressed, tantalized sensuousness belonging to Eastern performances in the saltatory line. It forms a popular entertainment in cafés of the lower order throughout the southern provinces, from Madrid all the way around to Valencia, in Sevilla and Malaga, and is gotten up as a select and expensive treat for travellers at Granada. But we saw it at its best in Malaga.
We were conducted, about eleven o'clock in the evening, to a roomy, rambling, dingy apartment in the crook of an obscure and dirty street, where we found a large number of sailors, peasants, andchulosseated drinking at small tables, with a very occasional well-dressed citizen or two here and there. In one corner was a stage rising to the level of our chins when we were seated, which had two fronts, like the Shakspearianstage in pictures, so that spectators on the side might have a fair chance, and be danced to from time to time. On this sat about a dozen men and women, the latter quite as much Spanish as gypsy, and some of them dressed partially in tights, with an affectation of sailors' or pages' costume in addition. At Madrid and Sevilla their sisters in the craft wore ordinary feminine dresses, and looked the possessors of more genuine Romany blood.
But here, too, the stardanseuse, the chief mistress of the artflamenco, was habited in the voluminous calico skirt which Peninsular propriety prescribes for this particular exhibition, thereby doing all it can to conceal and detract from the amazing skill of muscular movement involved. A variety of songs and dances with guitar accompaniments, some effective and others tedious, preceded the gypsy performance. I think we listened nearly half an hour to certain disconsolate barytone wailings, which were supposed to interpret the loves, anxieties, and other emotions of acontrabandista, or smuggler, hiding from pursuit in the mountains. Judging from the time at his disposal for this lament, the smuggling business must indeed be sadly on the decline. The whole entertainment was supervised by a man precisely like all the chiefs of these troupes in Spain. Their similarity is astounding; even their features are almost identical: when you have seen one, you have seen all his fellows, and know exactly what they will do. He may be a little older or younger, a little more gross or less so, but he is always clean-shaven like the other two sacred types—the bull-fighter and the priest—and his face is in every case weakly but good-humoredly sensual. But what does hedo? Well, nothing. He is the most important personage on the platform, but he does not pretend to contribute to the programme beyond an exclamation of encouragement to the performers at intervals. He is a Turveydrop in deportment at moments, and always a Crummles in self-esteem. A few highly favored individuals as they come into the café salute him, and receive a condescending nod in return. Then some friend in the audience sends up to him a glass of chamomile wine, or comes close and offers it with his own hand. The leader invariably makes excuses, and without exception ends by taking the wine, swallowing a portion, and gracefully spitting out the rest at the side of the platform. He smokes the cigars of admiring acquaintances, and throws the stumps on the stage. All the while he carries in his hand a smooth, plain walking-stick, with which he thumps time to the music when inclined.
GYPSY DANCE.GYPSY DANCE.
At last the moment for theflamencoarrives. The leader begins tobeat monotonously on the boards, just as our Indians do with their tomahawks, to set the rhythm; the guitars strike into their rising and falling melancholy strain. Two or three women chant a weird song, and all clap their hands in a peculiar measure, now louder, now fainter, and with pauses of varying length between the emphatic reports. The dancer has not yet risen from her seat; she seems to demand encouragement. The others call out, "Ollé!"—a gypsy word for "bravo!"—and smile and nod their heads at her to draw her on. All this excites in you a livelier curiosity, a sort of suspense. "What can be coming now?" you ask. Finally she gets up, smiling half scornfully; a light comes into her eyes; she throws her head back, and her face is suffused with an expression of daring, of energy, and strange pride. Perhaps it is only my fancy, but there seems to creep over the woman at that instant a reminiscence of far-off and mysterious things; her face, partially lifted, seems to catch the light of old traditions, and to be imbued with the spirit of something belonging to the past, which she is about torevive. Her arms are thrown upward, she snaps her fingers, and draws them down slowly close before her face as far as the waist, when, with an easy waving sideward, the "pass" is ended, and the arms go up again to repeat the movement. Her body too is in motion now, only slightly, with a kind of vibration; and her feet, unseen beneath the flowing skirt, have begun an easy, quiet, repressed rhythmical figure. So she advances, her face always forward, and goes swiftly around a circle, coming back to the point where she began, without appearing to step. The music goes on steadily, the cries of her companions become more animated, and she continues to execute that queer, aimless, yet dimly beckoning gesture with both arms—never remitting it nor the snapping of her fingers, in fact, until she has finished the whole affair. Her feet go a little faster; you can hear them tapping the floor as they weave upon it some more complicated measure; but there is not the slightest approach to a springing tendency. Her progress is sinuous; she glides and shuffles, her soles quitting the boards as little as possible—something between a clog dance and a walk, perfect in time, with a complexity in the exercise of the feet demanding much skill. She treats the performance with great dignity; the intensity of her absorption invests it with a something almost solemn.
Forward again! She gazes intently in front as she proceeds, and again as she floats backward, looking triumphant, perhaps with a spark of latent mischief in her eyes. She stamps harder upon the floor; the sounds follow like pistol reports. The regularclack,clack-clackof the smitten hands goes on about her, and the cries of the rest increase in zest and loudness.
"Ollé! ollé!"
"Bravo, my gracious one!"
"Muy bien! muy bien!"
"Hurrah! Live the queen of the ants!" shouts the leader. And the audience roars at his eccentric phrase.
The dancer becomes more impassioned, but in no way more violent. Her body does not move above the hips. It is only the legs that twist and turn and bend and stamp, as if one electric shock after another were being sent downward through them. Every few minutes her activity passes by some scarcely noted gradation into a subtly new phase, but all these phases are bound together by a certain uniformity of restraint and fixed law. Now she almost comes to a stand-still, and then we notice a quivering, snaky, shuddering motion, beginning at the shoulders andflowingdown through her whole body, wave upon wave,the dress drawn tighter with one hand showing that this continues downward to her feet. Is she a Lamia in the act of undergoing metamorphosis, a serpent, or a woman? The next moment she is dancing, receding—this time with smiles, and with an indescribable air of invitation in the tossing of her arms. But the crowning achievement is when the hips begin to sway too, and, while she is going back and forward, execute a rotary movement like that of the bent part of an auger. In fact, you expect her to bore herself into the floor and disappear. Then all at once the stamping and clapping and the twanging strings are stopped, as she ceases her formal gyrations: she walks back to her seat like one liberated from a spell, and the whole thing is over.
Velveteen and I came to Malaga direct from the Alhambra. The transition was one from the land of the olive to that of the palm. When we left Granada, an hour after daybreak, the slopes of the Sierra Nevada below the snow-line were softly overspread with rose and gold upon the blue, and the unmatchably pale bright yellow-white of the grain fields along the valley was spotted with the dark clumps of olive-trees, at a distance no bigger than cabbages. The last thing we saw was a sturdy peasant in knee-breeches and laced legs, with a tattered cloak flung around his chest and brought over the left shoulder in stately folds, that gave him the mien of a Roman senator, and put to shame our vulgar railroad plans. As the day grew, the hills in shadow melted into a warm citron hue, and those lifting their faces to the light were white as chalk, with faint blue shadows down in the clefts.
It was in this same neighborhood that we saw peasant women in trousers doing harvest-work. To the enormity of donning the male garb they added the hardihood of choosing for the color of their trousers a bright sulphur-yellow. My friend the artist, I believe, secretly envied them this splendor denied to men; and in truth they would make spirited and effective material for a painter. Their yellow legs descended from a very short skirt of blue or vermilion, a mere concession to prejudice, for it was mostly caught up and pinned in folds to keep it out of the way. Above that the dress and figure were feminine; the colored kerchief around the throat, and the gay bandanna twisted around the dark loose hair under a big straw hat, finishing off the whole person as something dashing, free, novel, and yet quite natural and not unwomanly.
An old man at Bobadilla offered us somepalmitos—pieces of pith from the palm-trees, tufted with a few feathery young leaves, and considered a delicacy when fresh. It had a bitter-sweet, rather vapid taste,but I hailed it as a friendly token from the semi-tropical region we were approaching. So I bought one, and my companion presented the old man with some of the lunch we had brought; whereupon the shrivelled merchant, with a courtesy often met with in Spain, insisted upon his taking apalmitoas a present. Thus, bearing our victorious palm leaves, we moved forward to meet the palms themselves. The train rumbled swiftly through twelve successive tunnels, giving, between them, magnificent glimpses of deep wild gorges; fantastic rocks piled up in all conceivable shapes, like a collection of giant crystals arranged by a mad-man, amid mounds of gray and slate-colored clay pulverized by the heat, and reduced absolutely to ashes. The last barrier of the Alpujarras was passed, and we rushed out upon lower levels, immense and fertile vales, dense with plantations of orange and lemon, interspersed with high-necked, musing palms and brilliant thickets of pomegranate. Through the hot earth in which these plantations were placed ran the narrow canals, not more than two feet wide, containing those streams of milky water from the snow-fields on which all the vegetation of the region depends.
It is of this and the neighboring portions of Spain that Castelar, in one of his recent writings, says: "The wildest coasts of our peninsula—those coasts of Almeria, Alicante, Murcia, where the fruits of various zones are yielded—compensate for their great plenty by years of desolation comparable only to those described in the chronicles of the Middle Ages, and suffered in the crowded lands of the Orient.... The mountains of those districts, which breathe the incense of thyme and lavender, are carpeted with silky grasses, and full of mines, and intersected by quarries. Thehonduras, or valleys, present the palm beside the pomegranate, the vine next to the olive, barley and sugar-cane in abundance, orange orchards and fields of maize; in fine, all the fruits of the best zones, incomparable both as to quantity and quality. The azure waves of their sea, resembling Venetian crystals, contain store of savory fish; and the equality of the temperature, the purity of the air, the splendor of the days, and the freshness, the soothing calm of the nights, impart such enchantment that, once habituated to them, in whatever other part of the world you may be, you feel yourself, alas! overcome by irremediable nostalgia." The eloquent statesman has something to say, likewise, of the people. "Nowhere does there exist in such vitality," he declares, "the love of family and the love of labor.... Property is very much divided; the customs are exceedingly democratic; there exist few proprietors who are not workers, and few workerswho are not proprietors." Democratic the country is, no doubt; too much so, perhaps, for peace under monarchical rule. These fervid, fertile coast lands, containing the gardens of Spain, are also the home of revolution.
A SPANISH MONK.A SPANISH MONK.
The north was the Carlist stronghold; the south furnished in every city a little Republican volcano. Nor is the simple, patriarchal state of society which Castelar indicates quite universal. Here, as in other provinces, we found luxurious wealth flourishing in the heart of pitiable poverty. The Governor of Malaga was on our train, and a delightfully honest and amiable old gentleman in our compartment, seeing him on the platform surrounded by a ring of dapper sycophants, who laughed unreasonably at his mild jokes, began to exclaim, in great wrath, "So many cabals! so many cabals! Unfortunate nation! there is nothing but cabal and intrigue all the time. Those men have got some sugar they want to dispose of to advantage, and so they fawn on the Governor. It is dirty; it is foul," etc.
At Malaga there was a coast-guard steamer lying in the harbor, and, as we were looking at it, I asked our companion, a resident, whether they caught many smugglers.
"Oh, sometimes," was the answer. "Just enough to cover it."
"Cover what?"
"Oh, the fraud. Out of twenty smuggling vessels they will take perhaps one, to keep up appearances." And he made the usual significant movement of the fingers denoting the acceptance of bribes.
The heat at Malaga surpassed anything we had encountered before. The horses of the cabs had gay-colored awnings stretched over them on little poles fixed to the shafts, so that when they moved along the street they looked like holiday boats on four legs. The river that runs through the city was completely dry, and, as if to complete the boat similitude, the cabs drove wantonly across its bed instead of using the bridges. These equipages, however, are commonplace compared with the wagons used for the transportation of oil and water jars (tinajas) in the adjoining province of Murcia. A delightful coolness was diffused from the sea at evening, when the fashionable drive—the half-moon mole stretching out to the light-house—was crowded with stylish vehicles, and the sea-wall all along the street was lined with citizens, soldiers, priests, and pretty women, who dangled their feet from the low parapet in blissful indolence. Then, too, the lamps were lighted in the floating bath-houses moored in the harbor, and one of them close to the mouth of a city drain seemed to be particularly well patronized. The streets, almost forsaken by day, were crowded after nightfall. The shops were open late. By eight or nine o'clock life began.
The Café de la Loba (the Wolf)—an immense building, where there is a court entirely roofed over by a single grape-vine, spreadingfrom a stem fifteen inches in diameter, and rivalling the famous vines of Hampton Court and Windsor—was well filled, and in many smalltiendas de vinoheavy drinking seemed to be going on. But the Malaguenese do not imbibe the rich sweet wines manufactured in their vicinity. These are too heating to be taken in such a climate, as we were able to convince ourselves on tasting some fine vintages at one of thebodegasthe next day. Nevertheless, the lower class of the inhabitants find no difficulty in attaining to a maximum of drunkenness on milder beverages. Even the respectable idlers in the café under our hotel drank a great deal too much beer, if I may judge from their prolonging their obstreperous discussion of politics into the small hours, while we lay feverish in a room above listening to their voices, blended with the whistle of a boatswain on some ship at the neighboring quay; ourselves meanwhile enduring with Anglo-Saxon reserve the too effusive attentions offered by mosquitoes of the Latin race.
TRANSPORTATION OF POTTERY.TRANSPORTATION OF POTTERY.
In justice to the Spaniards it should be said that excessive drinking is a rare fault among them. As a nation they surpass all other civilized peoples in setting an example of temperance as to potations (exceptingwater), and of remarkable frugality in eating. The Mediterranean ports, through their commerce with the outside world, are tinged by foreign elements; license creeps in with notions of liberty; the sailors, and that whilom powerful fraternity the smugglers, have likewise assisted in fostering turbulent characteristics.