CHAPTER XIII.THE ALHAMBRA (Continued).
BLASICHO, or, in good English, poor Blas, was an honest worker in leather, a mender of soles, in the city of Granada. There are streets in this queer old town wholly given up to one or another handicraft, and it is rather pleasing than otherwise to see the rule disproved that two of a trade can never agree. Perhaps it is easier for a whole street full of cobblers, or tinkers, or carders, or smiths, to live in peace, than it would be for only two rivals in trade, who would be jealous of each other as natural foes. It was curious to follow the walks along and see the little shops, sometimes not more than five or ten feet square, filled with the wares and the workmen, so that a customer would have had hard work to wedge himself in if he would be measured for a coat or boots, or examine the goods for sale. It looked as if there were some people willing to work, though we heard of a shoemaker who was called upon by a traveller like ourselves to repair his dilapidated shoe: the cobbler called out to his wife to tell him how much money there was on hand, and learning that she had enough to get them supper, he declined doing the work. This was in literal compliance with the Spanish rule which requires a man never to do to-day what can be put off till to-morrow.
Blasicho had a hard time of it to get work enough to earn the bread that his wife and his little ones must have from day to day, and he hated work, as all his neighbors did, and all his race do. If he had a wife with a cheerfultemper, to cheer him as he beat his leather on his knee, perhaps it would have been better for him and his, for it does make work light and easy to have a good-natured woman near at hand, to say a pleasant word and hear even one’s complaints with a sympathetic smile. But the wife of Blasicho was neither fair to look upon nor gentle in her temper, and she led the poor cobbler a vexed and weary life of it. His lapstone was not harder than the heart of his spouse, and the blows that he gave it were more in number, but not more severe, than she rained upon him, when their words grew into quarrels that always ended in the thorough discomfiture of the man of the house. Her great sorrow was that she had not wealth: her sisters had found husbands who could give them the best of every thing, and as much as they required to make fine ladies of them, but she had married a cobbler too poor to live without work, and too lazy to work, and the only blessing they had in abundance was a flock of children that grew in stature and numbers every year, and demanded more and more to keep them alive. She dinned her woes into his ears, and his poor soul was worried to despair by the ceaseless pother of her querulous tongue.
He wanted money. If California had been part of the known world in the day of Blasicho’s misery, his greed would have driven him to the mines in search of gold. But gold he must have, or his wife would worry him to death. He had heard that the Moors had left heaps of gold in the earth all around him, and if he had some rod to guide him to the sacred spot where the treasure was concealed, it would be the making of him for life, to dig it and carry it home to gladden the heart of his discontented wife, and stop the everlasting run of her complaining tongue. Day after day he walked around the hill of which the Alhambra in its glory and decay is still the crown, and he studied the projecting rocks and the gracefulcurves and gentle depressions, and the peculiar growth of the citron and pomegranate, to discover some signs of a place where it might be that in the olden time some Moorish miser, or in later time some Spanish pirate coming home from foreign pleasures, had buried his gold. His hope was suddenly kindled into certainty. One sunny morning he was taking his daily walk about the sacred hill, and passing through the deep cut on the eastern side, where far above his head the aqueduct with the waters of the river run into the Alhambra with its refreshing and ceaseless flow, he sat down to rest awhile and muse upon his hapless lot, and the hopeless search in which he was wasting his days. He looked up at the craggy side through which the red rock cropped, and on the scanty soil in which the almond shrubs were struggling to hold their own, and he was wishing that one of those red rocks were a ruby or even a lump of gold, when a dove, whose home was in the Tower of Comares, flew down upon a projecting rock, and cocking his eye most knowingly, looked below as if it saw something there that would be worth having. Blasicho observed the motion, and the thought came to him that the dove was a messenger to point him to the spot where his treasure lay. He took note of the rock, and drew a line, with his eye, to the foot of the hill where the bird’s eye had guided his search. A few feet from the path, up the cliff-side, was a ledge of rock, and it was easy to see that, a century or two ago, a man might have stood on it and worked into the mountain and buried his gold. The ledge would be the mark by which he could find it, and its height was such that no one would suspect that such a spot would be chosen as a hiding-place for money.
Poor Bias went home with his head full of the dove and the gold. All day as he sat on his bench pretending to work, the beautiful neck of the dove, with his head turned sideways, and his one eye down looking to the ledge, was beforehim. That night he dreamed that he went there and broke into the hill with a pick and found a heap of gold. The next morning he went there and the dove came again, and again she peered into the ledge from above, and again Blasicho was comforted with the strengthened hope. He dreamed the second time the same, and came the third morning and the dove met him as before; and again, the third night, he dreamed that he burst into the mountain and was the possessor of more gold than his insatiable spouse had ever dreamed of having. This was more than the anxious cobbler could endure and be quiet. That night in the darkness and alone, for there was no one in Granada he could trust with his discovery, Blasicho sought the ravine, climbed cautiously to the ledge with a bar of iron to aid him in his burglary. He struck in vigorously, for it might be a long night’s work, and time was precious. The hollow sound that answered his blows quickened his heartbeats, for it assured him there was a chamber within. Thedébriswas fast piling at his feet. He was already inside the hill. He heard something grating, rattling above and near him; he rose to his feet only to be struck with a land-slip which his digging had started: it caught him, dashed him off his perch, buried him, bruised him, half killed him, at the foot of his golden hill. The poor fellow struggled from underneath the mass of dirt and stones, and luckily finding no bones were broken, but more dead than alive, he crept home and went to sleep, while his wife was dinging into his ears her reproaches for his bad habits of being out late at nights. He was cured of hunting for gold in the dark. He became a new man, a new cobbler. His early hammer advertised his conversion. Business revived. He had to have some more help in the shop. The shop was soon too small. He wanted to enlarge it, and for that purpose he got permission of his landlord to dig away the hill in the rear to make room for an extension. This work heperformed with his own hands after the day’s work in the shop. That digging made him rich! What he found he had wit enough to keep secret, even from his wife, for if his landlord should hear of it, he would lay claim to it as in his soil. But Blasicho went on with his cobbling and building. He bought a few lots in one of the fashionable quarters of Granada, and to each of his daughters, to whom suitors came in numbers, now that he was evidently prosperous, he gave a handsome house and portion.
More than all, and better, his wife’s temper improved. He and she still lived over the shop, but the apartments were embellished with all the comforts that the amiable woman wanted, and she was proud, and not humbled, when her sisters came to see her. None of them knew the source of his sudden wealth, and indeed he was cunning enough to develop gradually, so that it was attributed to his increasing business, and his good luck in trade.
He knew that it all came of his being cured of money digging, and sticking to his work. He had never heard of the Latin proverb,ne sutor ultra crepidam,—let the cobbler stick to his last,—but he knew the soundness of the principle. And he taught his grandchildren, who were fond of visiting him, that when he tried to get rich in a hurry he got nothing but wounds and bruises; but when he worked faithfully and steadily at his trade, prosperity followed his labors, and his days were crowned with plenty, contentment, and love.
An old woman sat at the foot of the stone stairway, and took the fee that admitted us to the Watch Tower. On the southern edge of the hill, and rising high above the rampart, the broad flat roof of the tower affords an off-look that scarcely has an equal for beauty of prospect and interest in historical association. A bell swings in a turret; the rope hangs within reach; and there is magic in the ring. For the second day of January is a great fête day in Granada,—theanniversary of the capture of the city by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492,—and every maiden who ascends this tower on that day, and rings the bell with her own hand, is sure to have a wedding ring on her hand in the course of the year. The bell therefore rings right merrily on the fête day from early morn to set of sun, and the sign is as sure as any of the many that love and folly have conjured.
And in the far west, across the plain, rise the Parapanda Mountains, on whose top a cloud resting is a sign of rain, and when it hangs there they say it will rain “if God wills;” but if the cloud descends the mountain-side they say “it will rain if God willsor no.”
There too, off on the verge of the plain, lies a farm of 4,000 acres which the Spanish government gave to the Duke of Wellington for his expulsion of the French, and his heirs now derive a revenue of some $20,000 annually from the land.
And that gap in the mountains is the pass where Moor and Christian, the Cross and Crescent, have encountered each other in murderous fight, when knights in armor met hand to hand, and in protracted battles far more bloody and fierce than in our modern warfare they contended for the possession of this beautiful vale.
It is called thevega, or the plain, and from the watch-tower on which we are now standing we have the best view of it. Two rivers, like those that watered Paradise, flow across it,—the Darro, which the Moors called Hadaroh and the Romans Calom, and the Genil, which the ancients knew as the river Singilis. This fertile and beautiful plain stretches thirty miles or more away from the city of Granada, like a vast amphitheatre, a prairie sea: now and then a white cluster of houses, a little village, like an island on the surface of this great ocean of corn and wine. The snow-clad heights of Sierra Nevada rise to the bluest of blue heavens that cover it as an infinite dome, andthe five-hundred-towered city stands on this rocky height in the midst of this magnificent panorama, the green meadows and vineyards of thevegabelow, the white-capped mountains around, and the cerulean skies, so pure, so deep, so lovingly bending over and embracing the whole.
But the bell on the watch-tower answers a better purpose than merely to ring husbands for the lively Spanish girls. This plain is to be watered by these rivers, and they must be led away from their own banks by artificial channels to the thousands of plantations into which it is divided. But the rivers are not sufficient to allow the continuous flow of water through all these canals for irrigation, and the time and quantity of water are regulated by law. Each man has his water-gate, through which the stream is to come, and the hour when he is to open his gate and when to close is announced from the tower. At the stroke of one, all within a certain distance open their gates, and the water flows in upon their fields, until the bell strikes again, when they close, and the next open theirs, and so the supply is extended from one to another and the whole plain is watered.
The “Sigh of the Moor” is the name of that mountain in the south-east horizon, on the way to the sea-coast, and it gets its name from the tradition that when the last of the Moorish kings, the unhappy Boabdil of whom we have been speaking often, was flying from the city, he paused here, and as he looked back upon Granada “he saw a light cloud of smoke burst from the beautiful and beloved Alhambra, and presently a peal of artillery told that the throne of the Moslem kings was lost for ever. ‘Allah Achbar, God is great!’ he exclaimed; and, unable to refrain his grief, he burst into a flood of tears. ‘Weep not,’ said his mother, the stern proud Azeshah, ‘weep not as a woman for the loss of a kingdom which you knew not how to defend as a man.’”
As Bensaken pointed to the mountain of “El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro,” and told this sad story of the Sigh of the Moor, the tears stood in the old man’s eyes, and he was actually in sympathy with the Moor Boabdil who ran away from this tower nearly four hundred years ago.
Behind those hills, and in the valley beyond, there are to this day villages inhabited by a race of people who retain the Moorish manners and customs, mingling the Roman and Mahometan forms of worship, using no knives or forks, but eating with their fingers, in the Oriental style, and preserving with traditional jealousy the prejudices of the race that has been so long extinct in Spain. Rarely does a traveller climb the heights that stand between those settlements and the higher civilization of the plains and cities, but the few who push their adventurous way into those uninviting regions find themselves suddenly carried back into life and times of which we read now-a-days as if in the pages of romance.
Walking across the tower, we look down into a court, where a guard of soldiers is keeping watch over a prison! And, to our amazement, we find that we are in the very midst of the walls that contain four or five hundredpoliticalprisoners, who are here in durance vile for real or suspected offences. It is not the fashion at present to put to death political offenders, and the poor fellows that are shut up in these walls, hopeless and helpless, are perhaps on the whole disposed to think themselves better off than if they had lost their heads. Once the late queen punished the whole of her congress, some hundred and fifty, and sent them to prison, or foreign parts, thinking that their room was worth more than the advice they were disposed to give her. Some of the prisoners here confined are men of high social standing and of commanding influence in the country, but in the miserable strife for power and wealth, and the game of politics, whichis more corrupt, if possible, here in Spain than in our own country, they have fallen victims to successful rivals, and are now wasting away in the dungeons of the Alhambra. Some of them had obtained the special favor of working in the gardens and among the flowers and shrubbery; and, under the genial beams of the bright sun in winter, they found a grateful mitigation of their sufferings.
We had seen enough for one day, and took a ride over the city. Bensaken pointed out, as we passed the modest mansion in which the late beautiful Empress of the French was born. Her father, Count Montejo, fell in love with a daughter of the British consul at Malaga, Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose name unites Scotland and Ireland. The count married her, and Eugenie is their daughter. Her grandfather is therefore a Scotch-Irish-English gentleman. Some of her relatives are not of much account. One of them asked of me the gift of a glass of whiskey.
Not far from the Alhambra, and a pleasant walk across the fields, is the Generaliffe, a pleasure-palace in olden time, a retreat in the country from the more stately grandeur and closer confinement of the citadel.
It has been preserved with greater care, or perhaps restored from time to time, and is now one of the most interesting remnants of the Moorish dynasty. Its courts are paved with marbles, gladdened with fountains and flowers, and from some of them tall cypresses rise, which in other countries would rather adorn a burial-place than a palace court. One of them is the famous tree under which the beautiful Sultana Zoraya was sitting when one of the Abencerrages came to prefer a petition, and being seen to kneel before her, was suspected of making love, and her life and that of all his family was the forfeit. Bensaken was greatly provoked by the evident disposition of the writers of historical tales to insinuate that the Queen was actually receiving a lover, while he makes out a case ofinnocence and positively merciful virtue that would melt a heart of stone.
But if Bensaken was kind in his judgment of the ancient Queen, whose guilt or innocence will never be made the subject of inquiry before a court of impeachment in this world, he was less inclined to say a good word for the women of Spain. And in this matter he was no harder on them than others who have lived long enough in this demonstrative country to know the facts in the case. The women of Spain are, as a nation, more beautiful than those of any foreign country in which I have travelled, and this average beauty covers the peasant classes as well as the better-born. This is to be mentioned in connection with the fact stated by all who are familiar with Spain, that virtue is scarcely known. It is impossible, without disregard of the proprieties, to go into the statistics which an illustration of this fact would require. I was repeatedly assured that ladies would regard it as a reproach, an evidence that they were slighted, if they had not an acknowledged lover besides their legal lord. Of course the men are worse than the women, if worse can be, and little or no disgrace can be said to accrue when the vice is so common that virtue is an exception, and is despised at that. If it be asked, how can such a state of things be, when the church embraces in its bosom all the people, young and old, and confession is required of all who commune? the answer is easy. The forced celibacy of the priests tends to corruption, and they have no moral power over the people, unless it be a moral power for evil. And this vice is not necessarily a vice of a Roman Catholic people: it is the vice of the climate: as genial to the south as intemperance in drink is to the north. We must be charitable in our judgments of our neighbors and our fellow-sinners everywhere. It is a very common impression that the sins of a people are fashioned by the type of the religionthey profess; and that this vice, which prevails all over the south of Europe, has some relation to the Roman Catholic religion, which is also the ruling influence of church and state. Doubtless the reformation of the church would reform the state also, but human nature will remain substantially the same, and the vices peculiar to the climate would still discover themselves to a greater or less extent. Under the Protestant influences of the north of Europe, intemperance prevails fearfully. So it does in our country, in spite of the highest moral culture and the best opportunities of education. Religion in its purest forms does not reach the masses of mankind in any country so as to save all of them from vice, and in its imperfect development, as in Romish or half-reformed countries, it is even less powerful to deter the multitude from evil.