Of
Course, We Tried To Master The Facts Of The Generalife's Past, But We
Really Did Not Care For Them
And scarcely believed that Charles V. had
doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand of
Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations until
they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they
withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors. The arms
of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere
from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains;
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but
otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini
who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but
there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about in
tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes
before the keeper's door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of
fire-red peppers.
This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife,
but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and
many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the
city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to a church on
the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to which the garden
clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably
thrilling; but the best view of the city is from the flowery walk that
runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is
now a garden, long forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra
palace. From this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history
and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were very
critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I should not
mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in the world.
XI
Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides
the cold which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the
excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was the
production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense interest for
Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the Alhambra at one of the
highest moments of its history, and the persons were some of those
dearest to its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of course
the first company in Spain) had been in the hotel overnight, and the
ladies of it had gleamed and gloomed through the cold corridors, but the
poet had been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful
and blond, and powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a
violet cast. There was not so much a question of whether we should take
tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful
influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially given
up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be ashamed to
confess it.
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