“Who’s there?”

“People of peace.”

Encarnacion opened the door of the bell tower just a crack. Though the sun had not set, it was already dark inside the watch-tower of the Alhambra. The walls are six feet thick; the windows, narrow slits on the winding stair, let in very little light. Encarnacion carried a classic brass lamp for olive oil. She shaded the flame from her eyes with a long, hairy hand, and the light shining through showed how thin it was. Maria, the younger sister, as grim looking, though more timid in her bearing, stood behind, peering over Encarnacion’s shoulder.

“It is the young caballero and his friends,” she whispered. Encarnacion threw the door wide open, the two sisters smiled hospitably upon us like a pair of kind ogresses.

“But come in.”

“Come in.”

They echoed each other as if they were singing a perpetual duet.

“They are welcome.”

“Welcome.”

“Will they be pleased to enter?”

“To enter!”

We followed the sisters to a square room with enormously thick walls. A range was built into one corner, a charcoal fire smouldered under a tiny grate, where something that smelt very good bubbled in an earthenware pot. Four cages of canaries hung against the wall. A brindled cat stole in behind us, licked its whiskers, fixed fierce, unwinking eyes on the birds. Maria threatened him with her finger.

“Bad little cat! Who killed the young robin in the myrtle hedge? And now you make eyes at these? He knows too much to touch them; he looks and looks at them, and then goes out and chases the wild birds.”

In the middle of the room stood a round worktable covered with sewing. A jacket, half cut out of red cotton, lay near a pair of shears. From an

opening in the dark, vaulted ceiling over the worktable, dangled a long knotted cord.

“That is the rope of the campana de la Vela!” said Encarnacion.

“Is it true that it is you who ring the bell of the Vela?”

“Yes, once every half hour, from eight o’clock in the evening till four in the morning, we ring the bell in the watch-tower.”

“You sit up all night to do it? Isn’t it dreadfully cold?”

“Yes, it is often very cold. In winter we have a fire.” Encarnacion drew aside the chintz curtains that hid the lower part of the table, and showed a copper brazier covered with a wire netting that stood underneath.

“We kindle the charcoal, put our feet close to the brazier on this wooden shelf, and wrap ourselves up in heavy shawls and hoods. We manage very well, we are so used to it.”

“What do you do with yourselves through the long winter nights? How do you pass the time?”

“There is always plenty of work; we take in sewing. Sometimes one of us reads aloud to the other.”

“Do you two live here quite alone?”

“Sometimes our brother is with us, not always,” sighed Encarnacion. “I have been the portress of the Torre de la Vela since the night the tower was struck by lightning and our father and mother, now in glory, were killed.”

“Now in glory were killed!” echoed Maria.

“What a terrible thing! When did it happen?”

“Long and long ago,—the year Maria made her first communion. We were waked by a great crash. The tower shook, the bell rang as never before, there was a thick smoke. It was easy for us to escape, we slept below; our brother slept above, near our parents. He saved his life by clapping a towel over his mouth, and creeping down-stairs on his hands and knees.”

“On his knees,” Maria crossed herself. “Virgin mine! May the Lord receive them into Paradise in their shoes!”

“The bell gives the signal for opening the sluices,” Encarnacion went on; “it regulates the irrigation of the vega. Each piece of land has its hour for letting on the water. On still nights you can hear the bell thirty miles away.”

High up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains over Granada, the Darrow, a mountain torrent flowing down from the eternal snows on the summits, is caught, tamed, and led off into small channels that spread, like the veins of a man’s body, all over the vega. Moors’ work this; perhaps the greatest part of their legacy to Spain, for water

is wealth. Thanks to the Moors, the vega of Granada is the garden of the Peninsula; the hemp grown here is the finest, the olives and grapes are the best. The land bears three crops a year in succession,—wheat, beans and corn. Part of it is now given over to the new sugar beet industry; the beets grown here are enormous. The soil is light and clean; you will not find a stone in a whole field. The regulation of the complicated system of irrigation, the life blood of Granada, is in the hands of Encarnacion and Maria. To live in a tower, of all others in a tower of the Alhambra, and spend your life helping to make Granada green and beautiful, seems a pleasant existence, even if it be a lonely one. To wake when others sleep, and sleep when all the world’s awake, always seems a hard fate.

“Your birds must be a great company to you,” I said to Maria.

“Claro. We raise them ourselves. Would you like to see the little ones? We keep them in our bedroom where it is warmer.”

“Do me the favor,” Encarnacion relighted the lamp, and showed the way up the heavy stone stairway.

The neat upper room where the sisters slept had three beds. In spite of the thick whitewash on the walls, we could still make out the graceful lines of the old Moorish arches and windows. A palm branch, a crucifix, and a chromo of the Madonna of Lourdes appearing to Bernadette, hung between the beds. At one end of the room was a long table with the breeding cages of the canaries, whose loves and nurseries the sisters of the tower guard so tenderly.

“See this little one;” Maria put her face close to the cage and made a little singing sound. “He’s getting strong now; he was weakly at first, and I thought we should lose him. It would be a pity; his father is our best singer.” The canaries, all in a flutter at being waked up, chattered and scolded at her.

“Maria will take them up to see the view,” said Encarnacion; “if they will excuse me, I will go down in case some one else should call.” I am afraid Encarnacion knew we liked Maria best.

Down in the town of Granada the bells were ringing like mad, the nightingales were singing in the Duke of Wellington’s elms, that shade the long, steep road leading from the town to the red city of the Alhambra, perched high above it. At the foot of the tower was a carpet of wild flowers, anemones, wild callas, and many other blossoms I did not know.

“Is the snow always there?” J. asked, pointing to the Sierra Nevada.

“I was born in the tower,” said Maria; “I have lived here all my life, and I have never seen those mountains without snow. That is the campana de la Vela,” she pointed to a huge bronze bell hanging in the turret. “You should see the tower on the day after New Year. How many girls come up to see the view that day! They believe, foolish ones, that she who rings the bell on the second of January will get a husband before the year is over.” Maria smiled, with grim close-shut lips. Had she ever been weak enough to try the charm? For Encarnacion it was unthinkable.

“When Don Alfonzo was here we asked him to ring the bell. Though he laughed very much, he would not. From what we hear, he will be married before New Year all the same.”

In the Torre de la Vela they know all that is going on. It was growing dark; the stars were pricking through the blue; down in the city of Granada the lights seemed to reflect them.

“Is that the Gypsy quarter?” I asked Maria. I could just make out doors like the one leading to Aladdin’s cave, in the face of a hillside far below.

“Yes, that is the Albaicin. You have been there?”

“Not yet; to-morrow we shall go to see some Gypsy dancing.”

Maria shrugged scornful shoulders. “Take care they don’t pick your pockets. The Gitanos are great thieves; they are taught to steal from the time they are babies. You may like what you will see. When there are no ladies,” she held up her hands in horror, “their dances are not to be imagined or described. Do not let him go by himself.” She looked at Patsy, leaning over the parapet absorbed in the view. “They are deceitful hussies! The dances they dance when men go alone are very different from what you will see!”

“That would be a hot walk without the shade of those trees,” said Patsy. “Pleasant that we should remember the Iron Duke in Spain most of all for his elms. Who loves his fellow men, plants trees. The English are civilized, confound ’em! The longer you’re in Europe, the more you have to think of England as the Great Friend.”

There was no excuse to linger longer. The sisters had invited us to sup, and we had declined.

“Go you with God,” said Encarnacion, she came with us to the door. “To-night when you hear the campana de la Vela, think of Maria and me in the tower.”

“In the tower,” echoed Maria over her shoulder.

The next day we drove to the Albaicin, by the road of the Sacred Mountain. The base of the mountain is honeycombed with gypsy cave dwellings. The caves are built, or rather excavated,

at four different levels, and entered from rough terraces. The gypsy settlement seemed a sort of primitive community, like those from which Tangiers and Naples must have developed into the terraced cities they are to-day. Higher up the mountains are the sacred caves where hermits once lived. On the summit is a large church and a religious house.

“That old gentleman Don Jaime gave me the letter to,” said Patsy, “told me that the priests who live up there are no end of swells. They can’t ‘get in’ on anything but merit, not even royal patronage. They must show that they have the goods; must pass a stiff examination. Each one has his separate establishment, with his own house and garden and servants, and draws a pension of from three to five thousand pesetas a year. Most of them are great ‘orators’; they are sent for from all over Spain to preach, and jolly well paid for it. They always get twenty-five dollars a sermon, and have been known to get forty! Spain’s the place for priests; when I take orders I shall come here to live!”

The gypsy King met us at the entrance of his cave; a swart hulk of a man, with the voice of a bull and bold piercing eyes. Behind him stood his son, looking just as the King must have looked at twenty. The boy had a mop of coarse black hair—the King’s was iron gray—low forehead, strong white teeth, that curious veiled eye that later in life grows fierce and bright; body, hands, feet, exquisitely turned, color a rich olive, the look of race that is better than beauty, and the glow of youth that is best of all. It was small wonder the two ragged girls plaiting straw in the dust of the hot yellow road looked at him with longing eyes.

The door of the cave, fitted flat against the hillside, seemed to lead into the bowels of the earth. The cave, literally scooped out of the mountain, was divided into four decent whitewashed rooms, comfortable and clean enough. We went directly from the road into the largest; it was of fair size, with rough beams running across the ceiling and with a tiled floor. We were expected; great preparations had been made for our visit. A row of rush-bottomed chairs stood against the wall. Beautifully polished copper saucepans of many sizes were placed on a shelf, with some wild peonies stuck in a beer bottle. I somehow fancied that the saucepans would be for sale if we took a fancy to them. A small inner room, perfectly dark, led from the living room; it had a bed with a white crocheted quilt. On the left of the entrance was a cave room that served as a kitchen; on the right, a sort of property room,—where half a dozen women and girls with powdered faces and fresh flowers in their hair were waiting. The eldest, a fierce old woman with a beak like a parrot’s, dusted a chair for me.

“This is my house,” she said. Pointing to the King, “He is my son, these are all my family.” She seemed surprised at my asking if there was any other cave as good as hers.

“No,” she said, “this is the best; cool in summer, warm in winter, and clean, as you can see.”

The musicians, the King’s son and another youth with oiled hair and clean new jackets, took their places, twanged their guitars and the fiesta flamanca began. First a dance by two women, while the others sat by, clapping their hands, tapping with their feet, keeping time to the music.

“More power!” cried the King.

“DalÉ, dalÉ,” droned the chorus. The guitars twanged louder, the hand-clapping redoubled. Little by little the dancers woke up. The youngest woman was sixty, the oldest girl ten. This was a little disappointing to Patsy, though they all did their best and gave us good measure. The children were evidently students being carefully trained; the old women were all good artists, and intent on preserving and handing down the traditions of their art,—but the thing was somehow curiously academic! The old mother took a tambourine from the wall and shook out the music from it in fine style. “Tire yourselves!” she cried. After the second dance, she handed a tray with glasses of wine. Each succeeding dance was better than the last. The best of all was the one the old woman gave us at the end. Only once was there an approach to what Maria had hinted at. A woman with a bad face gave us a Jaleo, a gross, wriggling dance with unpleasant contortions of the body, wonderful as an exhibition of skill and strength, but not quite decent, and lacking the grace, the beauty, and the dignity of the old woman’s performance.

“Haven’t we had enough?” said Patsy, at the end of half an hour. “You saw those men tip the wink to our coachman as we passed? The whole village is on its good behavior. We are not to be shocked, annoyed, or begged from; it’s all put down in the bill we must pay the ruffian King for protecting us from his tribe, preventing us from seeing the real thing and giving us this fake show.”

Patsy was all wrong—because he was disappointed in the age of the performers! You can see a young and handsome Spanish dancing girl in any music hall in Madrid. The gypsy cave in the mountainside, where the dancers of the past and the dancers of the future meet, was worth a trip to Granada!

Of course we spent most of our time in Granada at the Alhambra. Some things must be experienced to be understood. Falling in love is one, Niagara Falls another, going down a toboggan slide a third, the Alhambra a fourth. The old simile of the oyster came to mind as freshly as if we had invented it,—just as every pair of young lovers imagine they have invented love! The heavy walls are the outside of the oyster; the fairy courts and halls painted with the tints of rainbow, dawn, sea, and moonlight are the inside of the shell. The pearl? In the room of the Two Sisters the winter apartment of the sultana, I had a vision of Irving’s Linderaxa. I could not remember how he described his pearl of the harem, but the face I saw or dreamed of as I sat in that fairy palace was the fairest woman’s face I ever saw. Her skin was like warm ivory, her hair an aureole of flame, her eyes, gray stars, her smile, the smile of the imperishable child.

I asked Patsy if he was disappointed in the Alhambra.

“Yes,” he said, “disappointed the right way. After the Acropolis, it is the best thing I ever saw. The lovely color, the movement of it all! Will you tell me how any people could invent a written language as decorative as this?” We were in one of the great halls looking at the Cuffik inscriptions that form one of the most fascinating and characteristic of the wall ornamentations.

“It is all based on Persian art, but it is even more joyous, don’t you think? You know the Koran discourages, if it does not forbid, the representation of any living creature in art. That is like the ‘Thou shalt make no graven image.’ Man and beast are practically ruled out of Arab art. Do you miss them? I don’t. After the gross use of men and animals,—remember the great bearded bullmen of the Assyrians, and the hawk and cat headed gods of Egypt,—this endless variation of leaf and flower and geometric design is refreshing. Why it is like a vegetarian diet to a sailor man who has had scurvy from living on salt beef.”

The guardian, who had long tracked us, here buttonholed J., and poured out a flood of familiar information. We listened mechanically, as he talked, until he said something we had not heard twenty times before.

“Last week two Moors from the Algeciras Conference were here. I myself took them about. They showed no enthusiasm. In this room the older one said to me, ‘These are sentences from the Koran,’ as if I did not know that before! In spite of all their pretended indifference, I knew very well what those Moors were feeling. It is a very deceitful race; they always hide their emotions.” The guardian spoke as scornfully of the Moors as Maria had spoken of the gypsies.

“Do you notice how they all dislike what they call deceit? The Spaniard is a truthful person, and honest. I don’t know why it is surprising, but after some of the countries we have traveled in, it comes like a shock!” said Patsy.

A long straight path of gold sand between two lines of tall, black cypresses leads to the old Moorish garden of the Generalife, near the Alhambra. Every other tree is clipped square at the top, the alternate one towering to a pointed spire. There is always a sound of gliding waters; in the early morning and evening, when the birds’ matins and lauds are sung, you can hear the nightingales and the merles. In the patio of the cypresses, under the shade of immemorial trees, is a great sheet of still green water like a vast chrysophrase, where you can study the cloud shadows, or your own reflection—if you are handsome—like Narcissus, or watch the greedy gudgeon and gold fish devour the bread you throw them. We passed through a long, flower-bordered path with a thicket of laurel, aloes and pomegranate for a background. A hundred tiny jets of water, like white aigrettes, waved among the green, and lost themselves in the shrubbery. We climbed the long Stairway of the Cascades, cheered by the babble of the little streams of water that run down the tops of the balustrade on either side. In the mirador at the top we rested, and looked down on the wonderful garden with its terraces, cedars, clipped myrtle hedges, thousand and one fountains.

“The Bankshires are only beginning here; in Seville the rose madness was at its height,” said Patsy. “We have travelled with the rose; we couldn’t have managed better if we had tried.”

From the mirador you see the Sierras with the eternal snow fields glistening on their summits. “The Moors certainly understood the use of water,” said J. “I have never seen anything quite so good as this garden even in Italy.”

There was music in the air, the rushing sound of water from those melting snows cunningly led down the mountainside and set here to dance and sing, to cool the heat and beguile the leisure hours of long, hot, summer days. Patsy watched with fascinated eyes a joyous saldadore of water leaping and singing under the shade of an oak.

“Water is to these people of the south what fire is to us northerners,” he said. “They are the two living elements, and they both dance. Dancing is the natural expression of joy in life; it is copied from dancing spray and dancing flame. David was quite right to dance before the ark. I had a

Shaker nurse who danced with me when I cried; I suppose that is why I’m so fond of it.”

Granada cathedral is so hemmed in with trumpery little buildings that it is impossible to get an impression of it as a whole. The mushroom growth will have to go. Each succeeding tourist wave sweeping over Europe, as the Goths and Vandals swept before them, sweeps away some such trash, and uncovers hidden gems of architecture. The interior of the cathedral, though over ornate, has some splendid architectural effects, and is rich in every sort of treasure ecclesiastical. I remember a curious white marble statue of the Virgin with a black marble cloak, and a very charming painted wood group of St. Anne, St. Joachim and Mary, a good example of one of the arts you must come to Spain to see. Painted wood statuary, wrought iron work, ecclesiastical embroidery and—dancing have all been carried farther in Spain than anywhere else in Europe. MontaÑes, Roldan, and Alonzo Cano, succeeded in making their painted wood statues and bas-reliefs as dignified as if they had worked in bronze or marble. Just as Luca della Robbia did with terra cotta. There is a polychrome carved retablo of the Entombment in Seville, by Roldan, that is a true masterpiece of sculpture. The outer figures are modelled in such high relief they seem almost free; those in the middle distance are in ordinary high relief, the more distant in low, almost flat relief; the background is a painted wood panel. This does not sound encouraging, but the material a masterpiece is made of is of little consequence; it may be wood, marble, iron, gold or woven wool,—if a master uses it, a masterpiece is produced.

As I was sketching the wonderful wrought iron screen that shuts off the tombs from the main part of the chapel royal, I heard two women’s voices: “You have made a mistake, I think. The tombs of Ferdinand and Isabel are on the right,” said an alert, gray-haired woman.

“Thank you; I know,” said a clear young voice. The last speaker, caught red handed in the very act of laying flowers on a tomb, was annoyed. She saw that I, too, looked with disfavor on the alert gray-haired lady with the guidebook, and by mutual consent we made acquaintance beside the tomb of Juana la Loca, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, and her husband, Philippe le Bel.

“Poor things!” said the girl who had laid the flowers between the two marble figures lying side by side.

“Poor things! Tell me their story if you remember it.”

“They were married when Juana was seventeen, and Philippe eighteen. She was very pretty, but he was the handsomest man in Europe. They only had each other ten years; even then they were not allowed much peace! At first they lived at his court in Brussels where they were very happy; life was not quite so strict and straight laced as at the Spanish Court. Isabel was a great queen, but I don’t think she could have been a nice mother. She sent a priest to be Juana’s confessor, a grim Spanish bigot. Phillippe laughed at him so much that Juana refused to confess to him. That was the beginning of all their troubles! The priest came back to Spain and told tales, set her mother against Juana. When she came home, to be with her mother when her child was born, Isabel tried to prevent her returning to her husband,—locked her up. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

She spoke as if it was happening now; her face was flushed; she clinched and unclinched her hand.

“But they couldn’t keep Juana; she was like a raging lioness; they had to let her go back to her husband. Then Isabel spread the report that Juana was mad,—and made arrangements in her will to prevent her ever reigning. Juana wouldn’t have cared about that; all she wanted was to be let alone, to have a little peace and happiness in her life. After Isabel’s death, those two poor things made their great mistake,—they came back to Spain. Somebody who was jealous of their happiness poisoned Philippe. Nobody knows whether Juana’s father Ferdinand was responsible for the murder or the Inquisition. I think it was the Inquisition; those cruel inquisitors did not want anybody to be happy, and Philippe was too liberal, too open-minded to suit that terrible Cardinal Jimenez. Juana and Philippe were at Burgos at the time. When it was all over, the friends who were with her at the deathbed told Juana that her husband was dead.

“No,” she said, “not dead, asleep!” You see, then, she really did go mad. They had Philippe embalmed and put in a leaden coffin; from that day Juana was never separated from his body. Wherever she went she took it with her; for twenty years she travelled all over the country with it. I saw her coach, the first that ever came to Spain, in Madrid. In those days, when royalties travelled, they stopped at convents or monasteries, if there was no royal residence near. Poor Juana was so jealous she would never go into a convent, for fear the nuns might look at her beloved! Philippe dead had his pages and his suite just as if he had been alive. Finally, Juana was shut up at Tordesillas. There she had the coffin placed in a chapel leading from her room, where she could always see it.

Here is a photograph I bought of Pradilla’s picture of Juana.”

The picture shows the sad procession on a windswept hillside outside Burgos just before dawn. The coffin stands on an iron bier, with two wax candles at the head and foot. A priest reads the service from his book. Juana’s ladies stand or sit exhausted on the ground. A group of pages and gentlemen in furred dresses stand near a fire kindled in the open. Juana, in a long black dress, stands beside the coffin looking down. “Dead? No, asleep!” she seems to say.

“For forty-seven years Juana watched beside the body of her husband. He died at twenty-eight; she lived to seventy-four. Their son, Charles V, gave Juana as fine a tomb as Isabel’s. I think she deserved it. A great lover is as rare as a great queen. Come with me and see the vault. That old battered coffin is Philippe’s, the very one Juana carried about with her. I touched it the other day. It made it all seem so real!”

We were standing by the royal vault, looking down through a grating at the coffins, when a fair young man with blue eyes strolled through the chapel and joined us.

“Haven’t you been here long enough, Joan?” he said. “Let’s get out of this stuffy old church.”

“All ready, Philip; I was only waiting for you.” She looked at him with adoring eyes, smiled kindly at me, and went off leaning on his arm. They were as pretty a young couple as you could see, and their names were Philip and Joan! It could hardly have been by chance that they were here. I fancied that the bride had contrived to include a pilgrimage to the tomb of the true lover, Joan the Mad, in their wedding journey.