We were obliged to pass through Madrid again, in order to take the diligence to Granada: we could, it is true, have gone and waited for it at Aranjuez, but we should have then run the risk of finding it full; we therefore determined to return to Madrid.

Our guide had taken care, the evening before, to send forward a mule, which was to wait for us halfway along the road, in order to take the place of the one we set out with; for it is doubtful whether, without this precaution, we should have been able to perform the journey from Toledo to Madrid in a single day, owing to the excessive heat we were exposed to along the dusty road, which affords you nowhere the slightest shade, but runs through tracts of open and interminable corn-fields.

We reached Illescas at about one o'clock, with no other incident to talk of than that of being half-baked, if not quite so. We were impatient to get away from a region which possessed nothing new for us, unless passing through it in a contrary direction can be said to add any novelty to the scene.

When we had alighted, my companion preferred to go to sleep; while I, who was already pretty well accustomed to Spanish cookery, began contesting the possession of my dinner with innumerable swarms of flies. The landlady's daughter—a pretty little girl of twelve or thirteen, with Arabian eyes—stood beside me, with a fan in one hand and a little broom in the other, trying to keep off the importunate insects, which returned to the charge more furiously and more noisily than ever as soon as she flagged in the use of either fan or broom. With this assistance I succeeded, however, in getting into my mouth a few pieces somewhat free from flies; and when my hunger was a little appeased I opened a conversation with my pretty fly-flapper, which conversation was, however, kept within very limited bounds by my ignorance of the Spanish language. Yet, with the aid of my diamond dictionary, I succeeded in keeping up the conversation tolerably well for a foreigner. She told me that she could write and read all sorts of print, including even Latin; and that, moreover, she played the pandero pretty well: I immediately requested her to give me a sample of her last-named talent, which she did with a very good grace, though much to the discomfort of my friend, whom the rattling of the brass rings and the hollow sound produced by the little musician's thumb on the ass's skin at length awoke.

The fresh mule was now harnessed, as it was necessary to continue our journey. In a heat of thirty degrees, it requires great moral courage to leave a posada where we see before us several rows of jars, pots, and alcarrazas, covered with beads of moisture. Spain is the only place where a draught of water ever appeared to me real voluptuousness: it is true that the water there is pure, limpid, and of an exquisite taste. The interdiction of wine to Mahometans is a law more easily obeyed than any other in such climates.

Thanks to the eloquent appeals our calesero never ceased making to his mule, and to the pebbles which he continually threw with great dexterity at her ears, we got on pretty well. Under trying circumstances, he called her vieja, revieja (old, twice old), to which injurious terms all mules appear, in general, particularly sensitive, either because the said terms are always accompanied by a blow on the back with the handle of the whip, or because they really are in themselves very offensive. By the aid of these epithets, aptly applied several times, we arrived at the gates of Madrid at about five in the evening.

We were already acquainted with Madrid, and saw nothing new in it, with the exception of the procession of the Corpus Christi: this ceremony has, however, lost much of its former splendour, by the suppression of the convents and religious fraternities; though it still retains an appearance of great solemnity. The streets through which the procession passes are strewed with fine sand, while canvass tendidos, which reach from house to house, afford protection from the sun and keep the air cool: the balconies are decorated with flags and crowded with pretty women in full dress; so that, altogether, the sight is one of the most charming that can well be imagined. The perpetual motion of the fans, which open and shut, tremble and flutter, like the wings of a butterfly about to settle down somewhere; the movements of the elbows of the women, wrapping themselves in their mantles and smoothing an ungraceful wrinkle in their dress; the glances sent from one window to acquaintances at another; the pretty inclination of the head, and the graceful gesture that accompany the agur by which the seÑoras reply to the salutations of the cavaliers; the picturesque crowd, interspersed with Gallegos, Pasiegas, Valencians, Manolas, and water-sellers, form a spectacle of the greatest animation and the most charming gaiety. The NiÑos de la Cuna (foundlings), dressed in their blue uniform, walk at the head of the procession. There were but very few out of this long file of children who were endowed with pretty faces; and Hymen himself, with all his conjugal carelessness, would have been troubled to produce offspring uglier than were these children of Love. Then follow the parochial banners, the clergy, silver shrines, and, under a canopy of gold cloth, the Corpus Dei, in a sun of diamonds of the most dazzling brilliancy.

The proverbial devoutness of the Spaniards appeared to me greatly abated; for, with respect to it, one might well have fancied himself in Paris at the time when it was considered fashionable opposition not to kneel to the Host. The men hardly touched the brim of their hats at the approach of the canopy. Catholic Spain no longer exists. The Peninsula is now under the influence of Voltairean and liberal ideas with respect to feudalism, the Inquisition, and fanaticism. To demolish convents appears to her, at present, the height of civilization.

One evening, as I was passing near the post-office at the corner of the Calle de Carretas, I saw the crowd separate precipitately; and then I perceived a brilliant galaxy of light coming up the Calle-Mayor. It was the Host hastening in its carriage to the bedside of some dying person; for the representatives of religion do not yet go about on foot at Madrid. The people had fled, in order to avoid the necessity of kneeling to the host as it passed. As we are speaking of religious ceremonies, we must not forget to mention that in Spain the cross on palls is not white, as in France, but of the colour of brimstone. The Spaniards do not use hearses, but carry their dead to the grave on biers.

Madrid was insupportable to us, and the two days that we were obliged to stay there appeared, at least, two centuries. We could think of nothing but orange-trees, lemon-trees, cachuchas, castanets, and picturesque costumes, for every one related wonders to us about Andalusia with that boastful magniloquence which the Spaniards will never lose any more than the Gascons of France. At length the long desired day arrived, for everything arrives at last, even the day we are waiting for; and we left Madrid in a very comfortable diligence, drawn by a troop of sturdy, close-cropped mules, with shiny coats, and which trotted along at a dashing pace. The diligence was lined with nankeen, and furnished with both roller and green wooden blinds. It appeared to us the ne plus ultra of elegance, after the abominable galleys, sillas volantes, and coaches, in which we had been jolted up to that time; and it would have really proved a very agreeable conveyance, had it not been for the furnace-like heat which calcined us, in spite of the lightness of our dress and the continual movement of our fans. The consequence was, that our rolling stove resounded with a perpetual litany of "Oh, dear! que calor! I am stifled! I am melting!" with numerous other well-assorted exclamations. We bore our sufferings patiently, however, and, with a little grumbling, tranquilly allowed the perspiration to run, like a cascade, down our noses and temples; for, at the end of our fatigues, we had in perspective Granada and the Alhambra, the dream of every poet—Granada, whose name alone makes the heaviest and dullest man in all the world break out into exclamations of admiration, and dance on one leg for delight.

The environs of Madrid are dull, bare, and scorched up, though less stony on this side than on the side leading to Guadarrama. The country, which is rather uneven than hilly, presents, everywhere, the same uniform appearance, only broken by a few villages, all dust and chalk, scattered here and there throughout the general aridity, and which would not be remarked, were it not for the square tower of their churches. Spires are rarely met with in Spain, the square tower being the usual form of steeple. Where two roads meet, suspicious-looking crosses stretch forth their sinister arms; from time to time, carts drawn by oxen pass by, with the carter asleep under his cloak; and peasants on horseback, with a fierce expression of countenance, and their carbines at the saddle-bows. In the middle of the day the sky is of the colour of melting lead, and the ground of a dusty grey, interspersed with mica, to which the greatest distance hardly imparts a bluish tint. Not a single cluster of trees, not a shrub, not a drop of water in the bed of dried-up torrents is to be seen; nothing, in fact, is there to relieve the eye, or to gratify the imagination. In order to find a little shelter from the burning rays of the sun, you must follow the narrow line of scanty blue shade afforded by the walls. We were, it is true, in the middle of July, which is not exactly the time of year for cool travelling in Spain; but it is our opinion that countries ought to be visited in their most characteristic seasons. Spain in summer, and Russia in winter.

We met with nothing worthy of any particular notice, until we came to the royal residence (sitio real) of Aranjuez. Aranjuez is a brick mansion with stone facings, presenting a white and red appearance, and has high slate roofs, pavilions, and weathercocks, which call to mind the style of architecture employed under Henri IV. and Louis XIII.; the palace of Fontainebleau, or the houses in the Place Royale at Paris. The Tagus, which is crossed by a suspension-bridge, keeps vegetation fresh there, much to the admiration of the Spaniards, and allows the trees of the north to grow to full maturity. At Aranjuez are seen elms, ash-trees, birch-trees, and aspens, which are as great curiosities there as Indian fig-trees, aloes, and palms would appear in France. They pointed out to us a gallery built on purpose to enable Godoy, the famous Prince of Peace, to pass from his house to the castle. On leaving the village, we observed to our left the Plaza de Toros, which is of a decided monumental appearance.

While the mules were being changed, we ran to the market to lay in a stock of oranges and to take ices, or rather lemon snow batter, at one of those refreshment shops which are met with in the open air, and which are as common in Spain as wine-shops are in France. Instead of drinking pots of bad wine and goes of brandy, the peasants and market-women take a bebida helada, which does not cost more, and which does not, at all events, get into their heads to besot their intellects. The absence of drunkenness renders the people of the lower class much superior to the corresponding class in those countries of ours, which we fancy to be civilized.

The name of Aranjuez, which is composed of two words, ara and Jovis, tells us pretty plainly that this edifice is built on the site of an ancient temple of Jupiter. We had not time to visit the interior of it, but this we do not regret, for all palaces are alike. Such, too, is the case with courtiers; originality is to be met with but among the people, and the rabble only appear to have preserved the privilege of being poetical.

The scenery from Aranjuez to OcaÑa is picturesque, without, however, being very remarkable. Hills of graceful form, well developed by the light, rise on each side of the route, and when the eddies of dust in which the diligence is running, like a god wrapped up in his cloud, are cleared away by a favourable breath of air, they present you with a very pleasant sight. The roads, though badly kept, are in pretty good order, thanks to this wonderful climate, where it hardly ever rains, and to the scarcity of vehicles, nearly all the carrying being done by beasts of burden only.

We were to sup and sleep at OcaÑa, in order to wait for the correo real, so that by joining ourselves to it we might profit by its escort, for we were about to enter La Mancha, infested at that time by the bands of Palillos, Polichinelle, and other honest people with whom a meeting would prove far from agreeable. We stopped at an hotel of decent appearance, before which was a patio with columns, and, over this patio, a superb tendido, of which the cloth, now double, now single, formed designs and symmetrical figures by its different shades of transparency. The name of the maker, with his address at Barcelona, was written on it by this means very legibly. Myrtles, pomegranates, and jasmines, planted in red clay pots, enlivened and perfumed this sort of inner court, in which reigned a clear, subdued kind of twilight full of mystery. The patio is a delightful invention; it affords greater coolness and more space than a room; you can walk about there, read, be alone or mix with others. It is a neuter ground where people meet, and where, without undergoing the tediousness of formal visits and introductions, they end by becoming known to one another and by forming acquaintance; and when, as at Granada or at Seville, the patio possesses a jet of water or a fountain, nothing can be more delightful, especially in a country where the thermometer always indicates a Senegambian heat.

While waiting for our repast, we went to take a siesta: this is a habit which you are compelled to follow in Spain, for the heat from two to five o'clock is such as no Parisian can form an idea of. The pavement burns, the iron knockers on the doors grow red-hot, a shower of fire seems to be falling from the sky; the corn bursts from its spikes, the ground cracks like over-heated porcelain, the grass-hoppers make their corselets grate with more vivacity than ever, and the little air which fans your face seems to be blown forth by the brazen mouth of a large furnace; the shops are closed, and all the gold in the world would not induce a tradesman to sell you the slightest article. In the streets are to be seen dogs and Frenchmen only, according to the popular saying, which is far from flattering for us. The guides refuse to take you to the most insignificant monument, even though you offer them Havannah cigars or a ticket for a bull-fight, two most seductive things for a Spanish cicerone. The only thing you can do is to sleep like the rest, and you very soon make up your mind to do so; for what else can you do in the midst of a nation fast asleep!

Our rooms, which were whitewashed, were scrupulously clean. The insects of which we had heard such awful descriptions did not yet make their appearance, and our sleep was troubled by no thousand-footed nightmare.

At five o'clock, we rose to go and take a turn while waiting for supper. OcaÑa is not rich in monumental buildings, and its best title to celebrity is the desperate attack made by Spanish troops on a French redout during the war of invasion. The redout was taken, but nearly the whole of the Spanish battalion was killed. Each hero was interred on the spot where he fell. The ranks were so well kept, in spite of a deluge of grape, that they can still be traced by the regularity of the graves. Diamante has written a piece called "The Hercules of OcaÑa," produced, no doubt, for some athletic champion of prodigious strength, like the Goliath of the Olympic Circus. Our presence at OcaÑa called this circumstance to our memory.

The last of the harvest was being got in at an epoch when the corn scarcely begins to assume its yellow tint in France, and the sheaves were carried to large areas of beaten earth, where horses and mules tread out the grain beneath their unshod hoofs. Both mules and horses are harnessed to a sort of sledge, on which the man superintending the operations stands upright in a posture of proud and graceful ease. Much self-command and skill are required to keep on this frail machine, as it is whisked along by three or four horses which are ever being lashed most lustily. A painter of the school of Leopold Robert would not fail to turn these scenes of Biblical and primitive simplicity to great account. Fine swarthy faces, sparkling eyes, Madonna-like features, costumes full of character, brilliant light, azure and sun would not fail him here any more than in Italy.

That evening the sky was of a milky blue colour, dashed with rose; the fields appeared, as far as the eye could reach, like an immense sheet of pale gold, where, here and there, you perceived a cart, looking like a small island in an ocean of light, and drawn by oxen which were almost hidden beneath the sheaves with which the cart was loaded. The wild notion of a picture without shade, which is so inherent to the Chinese, was realized here. All was sun and light; and the deepest tint that appeared upon the scene was of pearl grey.

At length we were summoned to a pretty good supper, or which, at least, our appetites made us think so; it was served in a low room, decorated with little paintings on glass, of somewhat curious Venetian taste. After supper, as my companion, EugÈne, and myself, were but mediocre smokers, and as we could take but a very small part in the conversation, on account of the necessity we were under of saying everything we had to say in the two or three hundred words with which we were acquainted, we withdrew to our rooms, greatly discouraged at the different stories about robbers which we had heard related at table, and which, as they were only half understood, appeared all the more terrible to us.

We were forced to wait till two in the afternoon for the arrival of the correo real, for it would not have been prudent to set out without it. We had besides a special escort of four horsemen, armed with blunderbusses, pistols, and large sabres. They were men of commanding stature, with pointed hats, large red sashes, velvet breeches, leather gaiters and characteristic features, encircled by enormous black whiskers, all which made them look more like robbers than guards and whom it was a cunning contrivance to take with you, in order to avoid meeting them on the road.

Twenty soldiers huddled together in a galley, followed the correo real. A galley is a two or four wheeled cart, without springs, and having its bottom formed of an esparto network, instead of boards. This short description will suffice to give an idea of the position of these poor wretches, who were forced to stand, and who could only keep themselves from falling by catching hold of the sides of the cart. Add to this the rapidity at which we were going—four leagues an hour—a stifling heat, with the sun darting down his rays perpendicularly, and you will agree with me that it required a very great stock of heroic goodhumour to think such a situation funny. And yet these poor soldiers, scarcely covered by their ragged uniforms, with their stomachs empty, with nothing to drink but the heated water in their leathern bottles, and tossed about like mice in a trap, did nothing but laugh and sing all along the road. The sobriety and patience of the Spaniards in supporting fatigue are something wonderful. In this respect they have remained Arabs. It would be impossible to show more disregard for material life than they do. But these soldiers, who were without bread and shoes, had a guitar.

All that part of the kingdom of Toledo which we passed through is frightfully arid, and announces the approach of La Mancha, the country of Don Quixote, and the most desolate and sterile province of Spain.

We soon passed La Guardia, a little insignificant market-town, of the most miserable appearance. At Tembleque we bought a few dozen garters for the use of some pretty legs at Paris; these garters, of all colours, cerise, orange, and sky-blue, were ornamented with gold or silver thread, and marked with various-lettered devices, that would put to the blush the most gallant ones on the trumpets bought at the fÊte of St. Cloud. Tembleque has the same reputation for its garters as ChÂtellerault, in France, has for its pen-knives.

While we were bargaining for our garters, we heard by our side a hoarse, discordant, menacing growl, like that of a mad dog. We turned round quickly, but not without a certain amount of fear, for we did not know how to speak to Spanish dogs, and then we perceived that this growl came not from an animal, but from a man.

Never did nightmare, placing its knee on the chest of a delirious patient, produce a more frightful monster. Quasimodo is a very Phoebus by the side of it. A square forehead, two sunken eyes, glaring with a savage fire, a nose so flat that its place was distinguished only by the nostrils, with the lower jaw advancing full two inches beyond the upper one—such, in a few words, is the portrait of this scarecrow, the profile of which formed a concave line, like those crescents on which the face of the moon is represented in the almanack of Liege. The calling of this wretch consisted in being without a nose, and in imitating dogs, a calling which he exercised wonderfully well, for he was more noseless than death himself, and made alone more uproar than all the inmates put together of the BarriÈre du Combat at feeding-time.

Puerto Lapiche consists of a few tumbling-down huts, huddled together on the declivity of a hill which is itself full of cracks and chasms, and become so dry and rotten by the heat that it is continually giving way and being torn asunder by the most curiously-shaped rents. It represents aridity and desolation in its highest degree. Everything is of the colour of cork and pumice-stone. The fire of heaven seems to have passed over it; and the whole scene is smothered by grey dust, as fine as powdered sandstone. This wretchedness is so much the more heartrending as the lustre of an implacable sky makes the whole poverty of the place most prominently apparent. The cloudy melancholy of the north is nothing in comparison with the luminous sadness of warm countries.

On beholding such wretched hovels, you feel yourself full of pity for the robbers who are obliged to live by marauding in a country where you might make a round of ten leagues and not find wherewithal to cook an egg. The resources offered by the diligences and galleys are really insufficient, and the poor brigands who vegetate in La Mancha are often obliged to be contented with a supper composed of a handful of those sweet acorns which were the delight of Sancho Panza. What is it possible to take from people who have neither money nor pockets, who live in houses of which the whole furniture is composed of four bare walls, and whose only utensils are a saucepan and an earthenware pitcher? To pillage such villages appears to me one of the most lugubrious fancies which can well enter the head of a robber out of work.

A little beyond Puerto Lapiche you enter La Mancha, where we perceived to our right two or three windmills, which lay claim to having victoriously sustained the shock of Don Quixote's lance, and which, for the moment, were listlessly turning their fans with the aid of an asthmatic breeze. The venta at which we stopped to imbibe two or three jars of fresh water, also boasts of having entertained the immortal hero of Cervantes.

We will not fatigue our readers with a description of our monotonous route through a stony, flat, and dusty country, only enlivened, at long intervals, with a few olive-trees, whose foliage is diseased and of a bluish green; where nothing is seen but tawny, haggard, mummified peasants, with scorched, rusty hats, short breeches, and coarse gaiters of darkish cloth, carrying a tattered jacket on their shoulders, and driving before them a mangy ass whose coat is white with age, whose ears are enervated, and whose back is pitiful to behold; and where you see at the entrance of the villages nothing but half-naked children, as dark as mulattoes, and who view you with wild and astonished looks as you pass by.

Dying of hunger, we arrived at Manzanares in the middle of the night. The courier who preceded us, profiting by his right as first comer and his acquaintance with the people of the hotel, had exhausted all the provisions, which consisted, it is true, but of three or four eggs and a piece of ham. We uttered the most piercing and heart-rending cries, and declared that we would set fire to the house and roast the landlady herself, if there were no other dish forthcoming. This display of energy procured us, at about two in the morning, some supper, to prepare which they had been obliged to wake up half the town. We had a quarter of kid, eggs with tomato-sauce, ham and goat's-milk cheese, with some pretty good white table-wine. We all supped together in the yard by the light of three or four brass lamps, very much like the funereal lamps of antiquity. The flame of each lamp producing, through the caprices of the wind, fantastic shades and lights, gave us the appearance of so many lamiÆ and ghouls tearing asunder pieces of disinterred children: and that the repast might have a perfect appearance of magic, a tall blind girl, guided by the noise, approached the table, and began singing couplets to a plaintive and monotonous air, like a vague sibylline incantation. On learning that we were French, she improvised, in honour of us, some eulogical stanzas, which we rewarded with a few reals.

Before getting into our conveyance, we went to take a turn in the village; we were obliged to grope our way, it is true, but that was better than remaining in the yard of the inn. We reached the Market-place, not, however, without having stumbled over some one sleeping in the open air. In the summer, the people generally sleep in the street, some under their cloaks, and some beneath mule-cloths, while others have a sack filled with chopped straw (these are sybarites); and then again there are some who lie on the bare bosom of their mother Cybele, with a stone for a pillow. The peasants who had arrived in the night were asleep, pell-mell, in the midst of curious vegetables and wild productions, or between the legs of their mules and donkeys, where they were waiting for daylight, which was soon to appear.

By the moon's faint light, we indistinctly perceived in the obscurity a sort of embattled antique edifice, where, by the whiteness of the plaster, we recognised the defences made during the last civil war, and which time had not yet succeeded in harmonizing with the main building. As a conscientious traveller, this is all we can say of Manzanares.

We got into our conveyance again; sleep crept over us, and when we again opened our eyes we were in the environs of Val-de-PeÑas, a town celebrated for its wine: the ground and hills, studded with constellated stones, were of a red hue and singularly crude, and we began to distinguish on the horizon ranges of mountains serrated like saws, and whose outline was very plainly marked, in spite of their great distance.

Val-de-PeÑas possesses nothing above the common, and owes all its reputation to its vineyards. Its name—the Valley of Stones—is perfectly justified. We stopped here to breakfast, and, by an inspiration from Heaven, I first of all took my own chocolate, and then that intended for my companion, who had not yet risen; and, foreseeing future famines, I crammed into my cup as many bunuelos (a kind of small fritter) as it would hold, so as to make a sort of pretty substantial porridge; for I had not yet learned the abstemiousness of the camel, which, I did some time afterwards by dint of practising abstinence worthy of an anchorite of the primitive times. I was not then used to the climate, and I had brought from France a most unnatural appetite, which inspired the natives of the country with respectful astonishment.

In a few minutes we set off all in a hurry, for we were obliged to keep close to the correo real, in order not to lose the advantage of its protection. On leaning out of the vehicle to take a last survey of Val-de-PeÑas, I let my cap fall into the road: a muchacho of twelve or fifteen years of age perceived this, and, in order to get a few cuartos, picked it up, and began running after the diligence, which was now at some distance from him; he overtook it, however, though he was barefooted and running on a road paved with sharp-pointed stones. I threw him a handful of sous, which certainly made him the most opulent urchin in the whole place. I mention this insignificant circumstance merely because it is characteristic of the swiftness of the Spaniards, who are the best walkers in the world, and the most active runners to be met with. We have already had occasion to speak of those foot-postilions called zagales, who follow carriages, going at full speed, for leagues together, without appearing to be in the least fatigued, or without even perspiring.

At Santa Cruz we were offered for sale all sorts of small knives and navajas: Santa Cruz and Albacete are renowned for this fancy cutlery. These navajas, of Arabian and very characteristic barbarous taste, have brass handles, which are cut through, and in the perforations of which are seen red, green, and blue spangles. Coarse enamel work, but cleanly executed, decorates the blades, which are made in the form of a fish, and are always very sharp; most of them bear some such motto as the following: Soy de uno solo, "I belong to one only;" or Cuando esta vivora pica, no hay remedio en la botica, "When this serpent stings, there is no remedy in medicine." Sometimes the blade has three parallel lines cut down it, the hollows of which are painted red, and then it presents a truly formidable appearance. The length of these navajas varies from three inches to three feet; a few majos (smart peasants) have some which, when open, are as long as a sabre; the blade is kept open in its place by a jointed spring, or a sliding ring. The navaja is the favourite arm of the Spaniards, especially of the people of the lower class; they handle it with wonderful dexterity, and form moreover a shield by rolling their cape round their left arm. This is an art which, like fencing, has its laws, and navaja-masters are as numerous in Andalusia as fencing-masters are at Paris. Every one who uses the navaja has his secret thrusts, and his particular ways of striking: adepts, they say, can, on viewing a wound, recognise the artiste who has inflicted it, as we recognise a painter by his touch.

The undulations of the ground now began to be more marked and more frequent—in fact, we did nothing but ascend and descend. We were approaching the Sierra Morena, which forms the limits of Andalusia. Behind that line of violet-coloured mountains lay hidden the paradise of our dreams. The stones already began to change into rocks, and the hills into towering mountains: thistles, six or seven feet high, rose up on the sides of the road, like the halberds of invisible soldiers. Though I have no pretensions to being an ass, I am very fond of thistles (a taste which is common both to myself and butterflies), and those I saw here surprised me. The thistle is a superb plant, which can be most advantageously studied for the production of ornamental designs. No piece of Gothic architecture possesses cleaner or more delicately-cut arabesques or foliage. From time to time we perceived in the neighbouring fields large yellow-looking patches, as if sacks of chopped straw had been emptied there; but this straw rose up in a cloud when we approached, and noisily flew away. What we mistook for straw was shoals of locusts, and there must have been millions of them: this reminded one strongly of Egypt.

It was somewhere near this place that, for the first time in my life, I really suffered from hunger. Ugolino in his tower could not have felt more famished than I did, and I had not, like him, four sons to devour. The reader, who has seen me swallow two cups of chocolate at Val-de-PeÑas, is perhaps astonished at this premature hunger; but Spanish cups are not larger than a thimble, and do not hold more than two or three spoonfuls. My melancholy was greatly augmented at the venta, where we left our escort, on seeing a magnificent omelet, intended for the soldiers' dinner, assume a golden hue beneath a sunbeam that came down the chimney. I prowled about it like a ravenous wolf, but it was too well guarded for me to carry off. Luckily, however, a lady from Granada, who was in the diligence with us, took pity on my martyrdom, and gave me a slice of La Mancha ham cured in sugar, with a piece of bread which she kept in reserve in one of the pockets of the vehicle. May this ham be returned to her an hundredfold!

Not far from this venta, on the right hand side of the road, stood some pillars, on which were seen three or four malefactors' heads—a spectacle always adapted to tranquillize your mind, and which proves that you are in a civilized country. The road kept rising, and assuming various zigzag forms. We were about to pass by the Puerto de los Perros: this is a narrow defile—a breach, in fact, made in the mountain by a torrent, which leaves just room enough for the road by its side. The Puerto de los Perros (passage of dogs) is thus named, because through it the vanquished Moors went out of Andalusia, taking with them the happiness and civilization of Spain. Spain, which stands in the same relation to Africa as Greece did to Asia, is not fitted for European manners. The genius of the East is apparent there in all its forms, and it is perhaps to be regretted that Spain is not still Moorish and Mahometan.

It would be impossible to imagine anything more picturesque or grand than this entrance to Andalusia. The defile is cut through immense rocks of red marble, the gigantic layers of which rise one above the other with a sort of architectural regularity. These enormous blocks, with their large transversal fissures—those veins of mountain marble, a sort of terrestrial subject, deprived of skin, on which to study the anatomy of the globe—are of such proportions, that they make the largest granite of Egypt appear microscopical by their side. In the interstices are palm oaks and enormous cork-trees, which do not appear larger there than do tufts of herb on an ordinary-sized wall. On reaching the bottom of the defile, you perceive that the vegetation increases in richness, and forms an impenetrable thicket, through which you see, sparkling in different places, the bright water of the torrent. The edge is so rugged on the side of the road, that it has been judged prudent to place a parapet along it, without which the diligence, which is always going very fast, and which it is very difficult to drive, on account of the frequent bends, might easily turn a somersault of some five or six hundred feet.

It was in the Sierra Morena that the knight of the rueful countenance accomplished, in imitation of Amadis on the rock, that famous act of penance which consisted in tumbling about in his shirt on the sharpest rocks, and that Sancho Panza, the positive man, the representative of vulgar reason by the side of noble madness, found Cardenio's portmanteau so well filled with ducats and fine shirts. You cannot make a step in Spain without meeting with something to remind you of Don Quixote; so truly national is the work of Cervantes, and so true is it that these two personages sum up in themselves the whole Spanish character—chivalrous exaltation of mind, and an adventurous spirit joined to great good practical sense, and a sort of goodnature full of finesse and causticity.

At Venta de Cardona where we changed mules, I saw a pretty little child with a complexion of the most dazzling whiteness, lying in his cradle, and resembling a wax Jesus in his manger. The Spaniards, when they are not burnt by the sun, are in general exceedingly fair.

As soon as the Sierra Morena is passed, the aspect of the country undergoes a total change; it is like going all at once from Europe to Africa; vipers, crawling to their nests, leave their oblique marks on the fine gravel of the roads; and the aloe begins to brandish its large thorny sabres at the sides of the ditches. These large fans of thick, brawny, bluish-grey leaves immediately throw a different appearance over the whole landscape. You feel that you are in a new country; you understand that you have really quitted Paris; but the difference in the climate, in the architecture, and in the costumes, does not astonish you so much as the presence of the large vegetables belonging to the torrid regions, and which we are only accustomed to behold in hothouses, in France. The laurels, the holm oaks, the cork, and the fig-trees, with their varnished and metallic-looking foliage, have about them something free, robust, and wild, which indicates a climate in which nature is more powerful than man, and in which she can do without him.

Before us extended the fine country of Andalusia, unfolding itself to our view, like an immense panorama. The scene possessed the grandeur and appearance of the sea: chains of mountains, which distance confounded with the sky itself, succeeded one another, with the gentlest undulations, like long rows of billows of azure. Large clouds of white vapour filled up the intervals; and here and there the rays of the sun streaked with gold some of the nearer mountain-tops, and made them sparkle with a thousand colours like a pigeon's breast. Other ridges, curiously irregular, resembled those draperies in ancient pictures which were yellow on one side and blue on the other. The whole was inundated with a most dazzling and splendid light, similar to that which must have illuminated the terrestrial paradise. It streamed through this ocean of mountains like liquid gold and silver, dashing a phosphorescent foam of spangles on every obstacle it met with. The scene before us was much more vast than the grandest perspectives of Martin, and infinitely more beautiful. The infinite in things filled with light is sublime and stupendous in a far different manner to the infinite in things smothered in darkness.

While gazing on this wonderful picture, which varied in appearance and presented us with fresh splendours at each turn of our wheels, we saw appear on the horizon the pointed roofs of Carolina's symmetrical pavilions, a sort of model village, or agricultural phalansterium, formerly founded by the Count of Florida Blanca, and peopled by him, at a great expense, with Germans and Swiss. This village, built all of a sudden, and raised at the will of one man, possesses that tedious regularity which is unknown in places which rise gradually, and in obedience to the caprice of chance and time. Everything has been done by line and rule: from the middle of the place you can see the whole town; here is the market of the Plaza de Toros; here is the church, and here is the house of the alcade. All this is certainly very nice, but I prefer the most wretched village which has taken its form at random. The colony has not, however, succeeded; the Swiss became affected with nostalgia and died off like flies, on merely hearing the bells sound; the ringing of them was therefore obliged to be discontinued. They did not all die, however, and the population of Carolina still preserves traces of its German origin. We had a solid dinner at Carolina served up with some excellent wine, and I was not obliged to take double portions: we now no longer travelled with the courier, as the roads are perfectly safe in these parts.

Aloe-trees, more and more African in size and shape, continued to rise along the sides of the road, and towards the left a long garland of flowers of the deepest rose-colour, glittering in a foliage of emeralds, marked out all the sinuosities of the bed of a dried up rivulet. Profiting by a halt made to change mules, my companion ran and gathered an enormous bouquet of these flowers; they were rose-bays of the greatest beauty and freshness. We might put to this rivulet, with the name of which I am not acquainted, and which perhaps has none, the same question that Monsieur Casimir Delavigne puts to the Greek river—

To the rose-bays succeeded, like a melancholy reflection after a silvery burst of laughter, tall olive-trees whose pale leaves remind you of the white foliage of the willows of the North, and which harmonize admirably well with the ashy colour of the ground. These leaves, which are of a grave, austere, and gentle tint, were most judiciously chosen by the ancients, those skilful estimators of natural evidence, as the symbol of peace and wisdom.

It was about four o'clock when we arrived at Baylen, famous for the disastrous capitulation which is known by this name. We were to pass the night there, and while waiting for supper we went to take a stroll through the town and about the environs with the lady from Granada, and a very pretty young girl who was going with her father and mother to take sea-baths at Malaga; for the general reserve of the Spaniards quickly gives way to polite and cordial familiarity, as soon as they are certain that you are neither a commercial traveller, nor a tight-rope dancer, nor a hawker of pomatum.

The church of Baylen, the construction of which does not date much further back than the sixteenth century, astonished me by its strange colour. Its stone and marble baked by the sun of Spain, instead of turning black as such things do in our damp climate, had assumed red hues of the most extraordinary vividness, and which even inclined to saffron and purple, resembling in their tints vine-leaves at the end of autumn. At the side of the church, a palm-tree, the first I had ever seen in the open air, rose above a little wall gilt by the reflection of the sun's burning rays, and abruptly spread out its branches in the dark azure of the heavens. This palm-tree—a sudden revelation from the East—thus met unexpectedly at the corner of a street, produced a singular effect on me. I expected, every instant, to see the profile of the camel's ostrich-like neck appear in the glimmering light thrown out by the setting sun, and the white bournous of the Arab float along the ranks of the caravan.

Some rather picturesque ruins of ancient fortifications presented to our view a tower, in a sufficiently good state of preservation to allow us to ascend it by the aid of our hands and feet and the jutting out of the stones. We were rewarded for our trouble by one of the most magnificent sights it is possible to behold. The city of Baylen, with its tiled roofs, its red church, and its white houses huddled round the foot of the tower like a flock of goats, formed a charming foreground: further on were immense corn-fields, undulating like waves of gold, and right at the back, above several ranges of mountains, the ridge of the Sierra Nevada glittered in the distance like a chain of silver. Veins of snow, played on by the light, brightly sparkled and sent forth prismatic flashes; while the sun, similar to a large golden wheel, of which its disc was the nave, spread out its flaming rays, like spokes, in a sky tinged with all the hues of the agate and the advanturine.

The inn at which we were to pass the night was a large building consisting but of one immense room, with a fireplace at each end, a roof of timberwork, shiny and black with smoke, racks on each side for horses, mules, and donkeys; and having, for the accommodation of travellers, a few small lateral chambers, containing each a bed formed of three planks placed on two trestles, and covered with those pellicles of canvass, in which floated a few lumps of wool, and which hotel-keepers, with the usual effrontery and sang froid which characterize them, call mattresses; but this, however, did not hinder us from snoring like Epimenides and the Seven Sleepers all together.

We set off very early in the morning to avoid the heat, and we again saw the beautiful rose-bays, as resplendent as glory and as blooming as love, which had enchanted us the evening before. The Guadalquiver, with its troubled and yellowish waters, soon appeared to bar our passage; we crossed it in a ferry-boat, and took the road to Jaen. To our left was pointed out to us the tower of Torrequebradilla, on which a sunbeam was playing, and we soon perceived the strange outline of the city of Jaen, the capital of the province of that name. An enormous mountain, of the colour of ochre, as tawny as a lion's skin, variegated with stripes of red and brown, and enveloped in clouds of light, rises abruptly in the middle of the city; massive towers, and long, zigzag lines of fortification streak its barren sides and give them a fantastic and picturesque appearance. The Cathedral, an immense mass of architecture, which seems, from a distance, to be larger than the town itself, rears its head haughtily, like an artificial mountain by the side of the natural one. This cathedral, which is of the Renaissance style of architecture, and which boasts of possessing the true handkerchief in which Saint Veronica took the impression of our Saviour's face, was built by the duke of Medina Coeli. It is certainly a handsome building, but we had imagined it, at a distance, to be both more antique and more curious.

On our way from the Parador to the cathedral, I took care to inspect the play-bills, and found that, the evening before, MÉrope had been played, and that that evening would be given "El Campanero de San Pablo," por el illustrissimo seÑor don Jose Bouchardy; or, in other words, "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," by my friend Bouchardy. To have your pieces played at Jaen, a barbarous town, where the inhabitants never go out without a poniard in their belt and a carabine on their shoulder, is certainly very flattering, and very few of our contemporary geniuses are able to boast of a like success. If we formerly borrowed a few chefs-d'oeuvre of the Spanish stage, we fully repay, at present, in vaudevilles and in melodramas, the value of all we have taken.

On leaving the cathedral we returned, with the other travellers, to the Parador, the appearance of which seemed to promise an excellent repast; a cafÉ was attached to it, and it had quite the look of a European and civilized establishment. Some one discovered, however, on taking his place, that the bread was as hard as a mill-stone, and asked for some other. But the hotel-keeper obstinately refused to change it. During the quarrel, another person perceived that the dishes had been warmed up, and must have already appeared on the table some time back. Hereupon, every person present began to utter the most plaintive cries and to insist on having a perfectly fresh dinner that had never appeared before. And now for the secret of this: the diligence which preceded us had been stopped by the brigands of La Mancha, and the travellers, whom they had carried off into the mountains, had not been able to partake of the repast prepared for them by the hotel-keeper at Jaen. The latter, in order not to be out of pocket, had kept the dishes, and served them up again for us; but he was deceived in his expectations, for we all left his house, and went elsewhere to satisfy our hunger. The unlucky dinner was, no doubt, presented, for a third time, to the next travellers.

We repaired to an obscure posada, where, after waiting a long while, we obtained some cutlets, some eggs, and a salad, all served up in chipped plates, accompanied by odd knives and forks, and glasses, each of which belonged to a different set. The banquet was very mediocre, but it was seasoned with so much laughter, and so many jokes about the comic fury of the hotel-keeper when he saw his company leave in procession, as well as about the fate of the poor victims to whom he would not fail to re-present his emaciated chickens, warmed up for the third time, as perfectly fresh, that we were fully compensated, and even more than compensated, for the poorness of our fare. As soon as the icy reserve of the Spaniards once begins to wear away, they immediately indulge in an infantine and naÏve gaiety, full of charming sweetness. The least thing makes them laugh till the tears run down their faces.

It was at Jaen that I saw more national and picturesque costumes than anywhere else. The men were attired, for the most part, in blue velvet breeches, adorned with silver filigrane buttons, and Ronda gaiters embellished with aiglets and stitching, and worked with arabesques on leather of a darker colour. It is considered the height of elegance to button but the first two or three buttons, at the top and bottom, so as to let the calf be seen. Wide sashes of red or yellow silk, jackets of brown cloth variously trimmed, blue or maroon cloaks, pointed hats with slouched brims, ornamented with bands of velvet and silk tassels, complete the costume, which is very similar to the ancient dress of Italian brigands: others wore what is called a vestido de cazador (hunter's dress), which is made entirely of buckskin of a tawny colour, and of green velvet.

Some women of the lower class had red cloaks and hoods, which seemed to make the darker part of the crowd sparkle brightly, and to bespangle it with scarlet. The fantastic style of dress, the swarthy complexion, the energy depicted in the features, the fiery eyes, with the calm and impassible attitude of these majos, more numerous here than anywhere else, impart to the population of Jaen an aspect more African than European: an illusion which is kept up still more by the intense heat of the climate, the dazzling whiteness of the houses, which are all whitewashed in the Arabian fashion, the tawny colour of the ground, and the unchanging azure of the sky. The following proverb on Jaen is in current use in Spain: "Ugly town, bad people;" but no painter would ever admit it to be true. But then, there as here, a handsome town in the eyes of most people is a town laid out by rule and line, and furnished with a certain number of lamps and tradesmen.

On leaving Jaen, you enter a valley which stretches as far as the Vega de Granada. The beginning of it is arid; barren mountains continually crumbling away through dryness scorch you, like burning mirrors, with their canescent reverberation; the only sign of vegetation is to be found in a few sickly-looking tufts of fennel. But soon the valley becomes narrower and deeper; streams begin to flow, and vegetation reappears, bringing with it shade and coolness. The Rio of Jaen occupies the bottom of the valley, where it rushes rapidly along between the stones and rocks which torment it and stop its course at every instant. By it runs the road, which follows it in all its sinuosities; for, in mountainous countries, the torrents are as yet the most skilful engineers in tracing out routes, and the wisest thing to do is to follow their directions.

A peasant's cottage at which we stopped to drink was surrounded by two or three little gutters of running water, which emptied themselves, at a short distance further on, into a cluster of pomegranate-trees, myrtles, pistachio-trees, and others of every kind, in a most extraordinarily flourishing condition. It was so long since we had seen anything really green, that this wild and almost entirely uncultivated garden appeared a little terrestrial paradise to us.

The young girl who brought us our beverage in one of those delightful porous clay pots which keep the water so cool, was extremely pretty; her eyes were long, reaching to beneath the temples, and her mouth, which was as blooming and as red as a beautiful pink, contrasted admirably with her tawny complexion. She wore a flannel petticoat and velvet shoes, of which she appeared very proud and careful. This style of beauty, which is frequently met with in Granada, is evidently Moorish.

At one point, the valley becomes extremely narrow, and the rocks project to such an extent, that they but just leave room enough for the Rio. Formerly, vehicles were obliged to enter and proceed along the very bed of the torrent, which it was somewhat perilous for them to do, on account of the holes and stones at the bottom of the river, and of the rising of the water, which, in winter, must be considerable. In order to remedy this inconvenience, a viaduct, similar to a railway tunnel, has been made right through one of the rocks. This subterraneous passage, which is on a rather extensive scale, was constructed only a few years back.

The valley soon widens again, however, and the road ceases to be obstructed. Here my recollection fails me for several leagues. Overcome by the heat, which the weather, inclining to storm, rendered suffocating, I fell asleep; and when I awoke, night, which comes on so suddenly in southern climates, enveloped everything, and an awful wind was sweeping before it clouds of inflamed dust: this wind must have been a very near relation of the African sirocco, and I don't know how we escaped being stifled. The form of every object disappeared in the fog of dust; and the sky, generally so splendid during the summer night, resembled the vault of an oven: it was impossible to see two paces before you. We entered Granada at about two in the morning, and alighted at the Fonda del Comercio, a soi-disant French hotel, where there were no sheets on the beds, and where we slept on the tables in our clothes: but these trifling tribulations produced little effect on us; for we were at Granada, and, in a few hours, we should see the Alhambra and the Generalife.

Our first care was to request a cicerone to take us to a casa de pupilos,—that is, a private house in which boarders are received, for, as it was our intention to remain some time at Granada, the mediocre hospitality of the Fonda del Comercio was far from calculated to promote our comfort during a long sojourn. This cicerone, of the name of Louis, was a Frenchman, and came from Farmoutiers in Brie. He had deserted during the French invasion under Bonaparte, and had lived at Granada for twenty years. He was the most comical figure imaginable: his height—he was five feet eight—contrasted most singularly with his little head, which was as wrinkled as a shrivelled apple and about as large as your fist. Being deprived of all communication with France, he had preserved his Brie jargon in all its native purity, spoke like an OpÉra Comique Jeannot, and seemed to be perpetually reciting the words of Monsieur Etienne. In spite of so long a sojourn, his thick head had refused to stock itself with a single new idiom: he was hardly acquainted with the most indispensable phrases. The only things Spanish he had about him were the alpargatas, and the little Andalusian hat with its turned-up brim. The fact, however, of being Spanish even to this extent sorely vexed him, and he revenged himself by showering on every Spaniard he met all sorts of injurious epithets—in his Brie jargon, be it understood, for Master Louis had a particular dread of hard blows, and took as much care of his skin as if it had been worth something.

He took us to a very respectable house, in the Calle de Parragas, near the Plazuela de San Antonio, and at a stone's throw from the Carrera del Darro. The mistress of this boarding-house had lived for a long time at Marseilles and spoke French, which circumstance immediately induced us to take up our abode there, as our vocabulary was still very limited.

They put us into a room on the ground floor: this room was whitewashed, and its entire furniture consisted of a rose of different colours in the middle of the ceiling, but then it had the advantage of opening into a patio, surrounded by white marble columns with Moorish capitals, procured, no doubt, at the demolition of some ancient Arabian palace. A little basin, with a jet of water in it, dug in the middle of the court, kept the whole place cool; an immense piece of esparto matting, which formed the tendido, let in a subdued light, and made the ground, paved and marked out into compartments with pebbles, glitter here and there, as if studded with shining stars.

It was in the patio that we took our meals, read, and lived. We used our room for hardly anything but to dress and sleep in. Were it not for the patio, an architectural arrangement which reminds you of the ancient Roman cavÆdium, the houses in Andalusia would not be inhabitable. The sort of hall which precedes it is generally paved with small pebble-stones of various colours, forming designs in rough mosaic-work, now representing vases of flowers, now soldiers and caltrops, or simply stating the time when the patio was constructed.

From the top of our abode, which was surmounted by a kind of mirador, we could perceive, above the summit of a hill standing out boldly on the blue sky, and through groups of trees, the massive towers of the Alhambra, clothed by the sun in deep red, fire-like tints. The view was rendered complete by two large cypresses placed in juxtaposition, and the dark points of which rose into the sky above the walls of red. These cypresses are never lost sight of: whether you are climbing the snow-streaked sides of the Mulhacen, or wandering about the Vega or the Sierra de Elvira, they are always to be perceived, dark and motionless in the mist of the blue or golden vapour with which the roofs of the houses appear, at a distance, to be enveloped.

Granada is built on three hills, at the end of the plain of the Vega: the Vermilion Towers—thus named on account of their colour (Torres Bermejas), and which are asserted to be of Roman or even Phoenician origin—occupy the first and the least elevated of these eminences; the Alhambra, which is in itself an entire city, covers the second and highest hill with its square towers, connected with one another by lofty walls and immense substructures, which form an enclosure containing gardens, woods, houses, and squares; the Albaycin is situated on the third hillock, which is separated from the others by a deep ravine choked with vegetation and full of cactuses, coloquintidas, pistachio-trees, pomegranate-trees, rose-bays, and tufts of flowers, and at the bottom of which flows the Darro, with the rapidity of an Alpine torrent. The Darro, which has gold in its stream, traverses the city now beneath the open sky, now under bridges so long that they rather merit the name of vaults, and joins itself in the Vega, at a little distance from the parade, to the Xenil which is contented with containing silver. The course of the torrent through the city is called Carrera del Darro, and a magnificent view is obtained from the balconies of those houses which border it. The Darro wears away its shores very much, and causes frequent slips of earth; there exists, in consequence, an old couplet, sung by children, which alludes to this mania for carrying everything away, and accounts for it in a peculiar manner. The following are the lines in question:—

The gardens called Carmenes del Darro, and of which such charming descriptions are to be found in Spanish and Moorish poetry, are situated on the banks of the Carrera, on the same side as the fountain of los Avellanos.

The city is thus divided into four quarters: the Antequerula, which occupies the brow of the hill, or rather of the mountain, on which the Alhambra is situated; the Alhambra and its appendix the Generalife; the Albaycin, formerly a vast fortress, but now a ruined and depopulated quarter; and Granada proper, which extends into the plain round the cathedral, and the place of the Vivarambla, which forms a separate quarter.

Such is the topographical aspect of Granada, traversed in its entire width by the Darro, bordered by the Xenil, which washes the alameda (parade), and sheltered by the Sierra Neveda, which you perceive from the corner of every street, and which seems so near, in consequence of the transparency of the air, that you fancy you can touch it with your hand from the balcony or the mirador of your house.

The general aspect of Granada greatly deceives the ideas you may have formed. In spite of yourself—in spite of the numerous deceptions you have already experienced—you cannot bring your mind to believe that three or four hundred years, and streams of matter-of-fact citizens have passed over the theatre of so many romantic and chivalrous actions. You picture to yourself a half-Moorish, half-Gothic city, where open-worked towers are mixed with minarets, and where gables alternate with terraced roofs; you expect to see houses sculptured and ornamented with coats of arms and heroic devices, grotesque buildings, with their stories overlapping one another, projecting joists, windows adorned with Persian carpets and blue and white vases—in short, the reality of an opera scene, representing some wonderful perspective of the Middle Ages.

The people you meet dressed in modern costumes, wearing broad-brimmed hats and long frock-coats, involuntarily produce on you a disagreeable effect, and appear more ridiculous than they really are; for, after all, they cannot be expected to walk about, for the sake of the local colouring, in the Moorish albornoz of the time of Boabdil, or in the iron armour of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. Like nearly all the citizens of every town in Spain, they think it necessary for their honour to show that they are not at all picturesque, and to prove, by the means of trousers and straps, their progress in civilization. Such is the prevailing idea which occupies their minds; they are afraid of appearing barbarous or backward; and when you admire the wild beauty of their country, they humbly beg you to excuse them for having no railways yet, and for being without steam-engines in their manufactories. One of these honest citizens, to whom I was extolling the charms of Granada, replied, "It is the best lighted city in Andalusia. Just look at the number of its lamps; but what a pity it is that they are not gas ones!"

Granada is gay, smiling, animated, although much fallen from its former splendour. The inhabitants are everywhere, and well merit the name of a numerous population; the carriages are handsomer and more plentiful than at Madrid. The sprightliness of the Andalusians fills the streets with bustle and life—things unknown to the grave Castilian, who, as he goes along, makes no more noise than his shadow: this remark particularly applies to the Carrera del Darro, the Zacatin, the Plaza Nueva, the Calle de los Gomeles, which leads to the Alhambra, to the square before the theatre, to the entrances to the parade, and to all the leading thoroughfares. The rest of the city is intersected in all directions by inextricable lanes of three or four feet in width, through which no vehicles can pass, and which remind you of the Moorish streets of Algiers. The only sound heard there is the noise made by the hoof of a donkey or a mule, which strikes a light every now and then on the glittering flints which pave the road, or the monotonous tinkling of a guitar which some one is playing at the bottom of a yard.

The balconies, furnished with blinds and ornamented with shrubs and vases of flowers, the vine-runners creeping from one window to another, the rose-bays raising their blooming flowers above the garden walls, the curious effect of the sun and shade, whose fantastic frolics remind you of Decamps's pictures representing Turkish villages, the women seated before the doors, the half-naked children playing and rolling about at their sides, the donkeys going backwards and forwards loaded with feathers and woollen tufts, give these lanes, which are nearly always up-hill and sometimes intersected with steps, a peculiar appearance which has a certain charm about it, and which compensates—nay, more than compensates for their want of regularity, by the novel and unlooked-for things you see.

Victor Hugo, in his charming "Orientale," says of Granada,—

This is perfectly true. The houses of persons at all well off are painted outside in the most fantastic manner with imitations of architectural embellishments, sham cameos on grey grounds, and false bas-reliefs. You have before you a medley of mouldings, modillions, piers, urn-like vessels, volutes, medallions ornamented with rose-coloured tufts, ovoloes, bits of embroidery, pot-bellied cupids supporting all sorts of allegorical figures, on apple-green, bright flesh-colour, or fawn-tinted backgrounds, all which, high art tells us, argues bad taste carried to its utmost limits. At first, you have some difficulty to bring yourself to look upon these illuminated faÇades as real dwelling-houses. You fancy you are walking among the scenery of a theatre. We had already seen houses illuminated in this manner at Toledo, but they are very much behind those of Granada in the extravagance of their decorations and the strangeness of their colours. As for myself, I do not dislike this fashion, which pleases the sight and forms a happy contrast with the chalky colour of the whitewashed walls.

We just now mentioned the adoption by the upper classes of the French style of dress; but the man of the people does not, luckily, study Parisian fashions. He has still kept the pointed hat with a velvet brim, adorned with silk tassels, or the one of stunted form with a wide flap, like a turban, the jacket ornamented at the elbows, the cuffs, and the collar, with embroidery, and pieces of cloth of all colours, and which vaguely reminds you of the Turkish jackets, the red or yellow sash, the breeches furnished with filigrane buttons, or with small coins soldered to a shank, with the leather gaiters open up the side to let the leg be seen; the whole being more striking, more gorgeous, more flowered, more dazzling, more loaded with tinsel and gewgaws, than the costume of any other province. You see also many other costumes known by the name of vestido de cazador (hunter's dress), made of Cordova leather and blue or green velvet, and ornamented with aiglets. It is considered highly fashionable to carry a cane (vara) or white stick, four feet long, slit up at the end, and on which the person carrying it leans negligently when he stops to speak to any one. No majo possessing the least respect for himself would ever dare appear in public without a vara. Two handkerchiefs, with their ends hanging out of the jacket pockets, a long navaja stuck in the sash, not in front, but in the middle of the back, constitute the height of elegance for these coxcombs of the people.

This costume so pleased my fancy, that my first care was to order one. They took me to Don Juan Zafata, a person who had a great reputation for national costumes, and who had as great a hatred for black dress-coats and frock-coats as I have. Seeing that my antipathy coincided with his own, he gave free course to his sorrow, and poured into my breast his elegies on the decline of art. With grief that found an echo in myself did he remind me of the happy time when foreigners dressed in the French fashion would have been hooted through the streets and pelted with orange-peel; when the toreadores wore jackets embroidered with gold and silver, which were worth more than five hundred piÉcettes; and when the young men of good family had trimmings and aiglets of an enormous price. "Alas! sir, the English are the only persons who buy Spanish clothes now," said he, as he finished taking my measure.

This SeÑor Zapata was, with respect to his clothes, something like Cardillac with respect to his jewels. He was always sorely grieved at having to give them up to his customers. When he came to try on my suit, he was so delighted with the splendid appearance of the flower-pot he had embroidered in the middle of the back on the brown cloth ground, that he broke out into exclamations of the most frantic joy, and began to commit all sorts of extravagances. But all at once the thought that he should have to leave this chef-d'oeuvre in my hands put a stop to his hilarity, and his features suddenly became overcast. Under the pretext of making I know not what alteration, he wrapped the garment up in a handkerchief, gave it to his apprentice, for a Spanish tailor would think himself dishonoured if he carried his own parcels, and casting at me a fierce, ironical look, hurried away as if a thousand demons were pursuing him. The next day he came back alone, and, taking from a leathern purse the money I had paid him, he told me that it grieved him so much to part with his jacket, that he preferred to return me my duros. It was only after I had observed that this costume would give the Parisians a great idea of his talent, and create him a reputation in Paris, that he consented to let me have it.

The women have had the good taste not to discard the mantilla, the most delicious style of head-dress for the display of Spanish features; gracefully enveloped in their black lace, they go about the streets and public walks, with nothing on their heads but the mantilla, and a red pink at each temple, and glide along the walls, while skilfully using their fans, with the most incomparable grace and agility. A bonnet is a rare thing in Granada. The women of fashion have, it is true, some jonquil, or poppy-coloured thing, carefully put away in a bonnet-box, to be kept for grand occasions; but such occasions, thank Heaven, are very rare, and the horrible bonnets only see the light on the saint's day of the Queen, or at the solemn sittings of the Lyceum. May our fashions never invade the city of the caliphs, and may we never see realized the terrible menace contained in the two words, "Modista Francesa," painted in black at the entrance of a public square! Persons of a grave character will, doubtless, think us very futile, and ridicule our grief about the extinction of the picturesque, but then we are of opinion, that patent leather boots and mackintoshes contribute very little to civilization, and we even look upon civilization itself as a thing far from desirable. It is a melancholy spectacle for a poet, an artist, and a philosopher, to see both form and colour disappear from the world, lines become confused, tints confounded, and the most disheartening uniformity invade everything, under the pretext of I know not what progress. When all things are alike, there will be no further need for travelling, but, by a happy coincidence, that will be the very time when railways will be in full activity. What will be the good of making a long journey at the rate of ten leagues an hour, to go and look at a number of streets lighted, like the Rue de la Paix, with gas, and full of well-to-do citizens? We do not think that it was for this that Nature modelled each country in a different shape, supplied it with plants peculiar to itself, and peopled the world with races dissimilar to each other in conformation, colour, and language. It is giving a bad interpretation to the meaning for which the world was created, to wish it to force the same livery on men of every climate; and yet this is one of the errors of European civilization: a coat with long narrow tails makes a man look much uglier than any other costume would, and keeps him quite as barbarous. The poor Turks of Sultan Mahmoud have certainly cut a fine figure since the reform made in their old Asiatic costume, and the progress of knowledge among them has been prodigious indeed!

In order to reach the parade, you must go along the Carrera del Darro and cross the Plaza del Teatro, where there is a funereal column raised to the memory of Joaquin MaÏquez by Julian Romea, Matilda Diez, and other dramatic artistes: the faÇade of the Arsenal, a structure of bad taste, besmeared with yellow and decorated with statues of grenadiers painted mouse-grey, looks on the square.

The Alameda of Granada is certainly one of the most agreeable places in the world; it is called the Saloon, a singular name for a parade; fancy a long walk furnished with several rows of trees of a verdancy unique in Spain, and terminating at each end by a monumental fountain, the top basins of which support on their shoulders aquatic gods, curious by their deformity, and delightfully barbarous. These fountains, contrary to the custom of such constructions, throw out the water in large sheets, which, evaporating in the form of fine rain and mist, spreads around a most delicious coolness. In the side walks run streams of crystalline transparency, encased in beds of different coloured pebbles. A large parterre, ornamented with jets of water and crowded with shrubs and flowers, myrtles, roses, jasmines, with all the riches, in fact, of the Granadian Flora, occupies the space between the Saloon and the Xenil, and stretches as far as the bridge constructed by General Sebastiani at the time of the French invasion. The Xenil runs from the Sierra Neveda in its marble bed, through woods of laurel of the most incomparable beauty. Glass and crystal form comparisons too opaque and too thick to give a true idea of the purity of the water which, but the evening before, was still flowing in sheets of silver on the white shoulders of the Sierra Neveda. It is like a torrent of diamonds in a state of fusion.

The fashionable world of Granada assemble on the Saloon, between seven and eight in the evening; the carriages follow along the road, but they are for the most part empty, as the Spaniards are very fond of walking, and in spite of their pride, deign to use their own legs. Nothing can be more charming than to see the young women and young girls pass to and fro in little groups, dressed in their mantillas, with their arms bare, real flowers in their hair, satin shoes on their feet, and a fan in their hand, followed at some distance by their friends and sweethearts, for, as we have already said, when speaking of the Prado at Madrid, it is not customary in Spain for the women to take the arms of the men. This habit of walking alone gives them a bold, elegant, and free deportment unknown to our women, who are always hanging to some arm or other. As artists say, they carry themselves beautifully. This perpetual separation of the men from the women, at least in public, already smacks of the East.

A sight of which the people of the North can have no idea, is the Alameda of Granada at sunset. The Sierra Neveda, whose denticulated ridges face the city on this side, assumes the most unimaginable hues. Its whole steep and rugged flank and all its peaks, struck by the light, become of a rose-colour, dazzling to behold; ideal, fabulous, shot with silver, and streaked with iris and opal-like reflections, which would make the freshest tints on the artist's palette appear thick and dirty: the hues of mother-of-pearl, the transparency of the ruby, and veins of agate and advanturine that would defy all the fairy jewellery of the "Thousand-and-one Nights," are to be seen there. The hollows, crevices, anfractuosities, and all the places which the rays of the setting sun cannot reach are of a blue colour which vies with the azure of the sky and sea, with the lapis-lazuli and the sapphire; this contrast of hue between light and shade produces a wonderful effect: the mountain seems to have put on an immense robe of shot silk spangled and bordered with silver; little by little, the bright colours disappear and turn to violet mezzotintos, darkness invades the lower ridges, the light withdraws towards the summit, and all the plain has long since been in obscurity, while the silver diadem of the Sierra still shines out in the serenity of the sky, beneath the parting kiss sent it by the sun.

The company take a turn or two more and then disperse, some going to take sherbet or agraz at the cafÉ of Don Pedro Hurtado, where you get the best ice in Granada, and others to the tertulia at their friends' and acquaintances' houses.

This is the gayest and most lively part of the day at Granada. The shops of the aguadores and sellers of ices in the open street are illuminated by a multitude of lamps and lanterns; the street lamps and the lights placed before the images of the madonnas vie in splendour and number with the stars, and this is saying something: if it happens to be moonlight, you can easily see to read the most microscopical print. The light is blue instead of being yellow, and that is all.

Thanks to the lady who had saved me from dying of hunger in the diligence, and who introduced us to several of her friends, we were soon well known in Granada. We led a delicious life there. It would be impossible to receive a more cordial, frank, and amiable welcome than we did; at the end of five or six days we were on the most intimate terms with every one, and according to the Spanish custom, we were always called by our Christian names; at Granada I was Don Teofilo, my friend gloried in the appellation of Don Eugenio, and we were both at liberty to designate the ladies and young girls of the houses in which we were received, by the familiar names of Carmen, Teresa, Gala, &c.; this familiarity clashes in no way with the most polished manners and the most respectful attention.

We went to tertulia every evening from eight o'clock till twelve; to-day at one house, to-morrow at another. The tertulia is held in the patio, surrounded by alabaster columns and ornamented by a jet of water, the basin of which is encircled with pots of flowers and boxes of shrubs, down whose leaves the water falls in large beads. Five or six lamps are hung up along the walls: sofas, and straw or cane-bottomed chairs furnish the galleries, with here and there a guitar. The piano occupies one corner, and in another stand card-tables. Every one, on entering, goes to pay his compliments to the mistress and master of the house, who never fail to offer you a cup of chocolate, that good taste tells you to refuse, and a cigarette, which is sometimes accepted. When this duty is over, you retire to a corner of the patio, and join the group which has most attraction for you. The parents and old people play at trecillo, the young men talk with the young girls, recite the octaves and the decastichs they have composed during the day, and are scolded and forced to do penance for the crimes they may have committed the evening before; such, for instance, as having danced too often with a pretty cousin, or cast too ardent a glance towards a proscribed balcony, with numerous other peccadilloes. If, on the contrary, they have been very good, they are rewarded for the rose they have brought with the pink in the young girls' breast or hair, and their squeeze of the hand is replied to by a gentle look and a slight pressure of the fingers, when all go up into the balcony to listen to the Retreat beaten by the troops. Love seems to be the sole business of Granada. You have only to speak two or three times to a young girl, and the entire city immediately declare you to be novio and novia,—that is, affianced, and make a thousand innocent jokes about the passion they have invented for you; which jokes, innocent though they be, do not fail, however, to make you somewhat uneasy, by bringing visions of conjugal life before your eyes. All this gallantry is, however, more apparent than real; in spite of languishing glances, burning looks, tender or impassioned conversations, pretty little shortenings of your name, and the querido (beloved) with which it is preceded, you must not conceive any too flattering ideas. A Frenchman to whom a woman of the world were to say the quarter of what a young Granadian girl says to one of her numerous novios, without the least importance being attached to it, would think himself already in Paradise; but he would soon find his mistake, for if he became too bold, he would be instantly called to order, and summoned to state his matrimonial intentions before the nearest relatives. This honest liberty of language, so far removed from the forced and artificial manners of the nations of the north, is preferable to hypocrisy of speech, which always hides, at bottom, some coarse thought or other. At Granada, to pay attentions to a married woman seems quite extraordinary; while nothing appears more natural there than to pay court to a young girl. It is the contrary in France: no one ever addresses, there, a word to young, unmarried ladies, and this is what so often renders marriages unhappy. In Spain, a novio sees his novia two or three times a day, speaks to her without witnesses, accompanies her in her walks, and comes to talk with her in the evening through the bars of the balcony, or the window of the ground-floor. He thus has time to become acquainted with her, to study her character, and does not buy, as the saying is, a pig in a poke.

When the conversation flags, one of the gentlemen takes down a guitar, and, scratching the cords with his nails and keeping time with the palm of his hand on the centre of the instrument, begins to sing some gay Andalusian song or some comic couplet, interspersed with Ay! and Ola! curiously modulated and productive of a very singular effect. Then a lady sits down to the piano, and plays a morceau from Bellini, who appears to be the favourite maestro of the Spaniards, or sings a romance of Breton de los Herreros, the great versifier of Madrid. The evening is terminated by a little extempore ball, at which, alas! they dance neither jota, nor fandango, nor bolero, these dances being abandoned to peasants, servants, and gipsies; but they dance quadrilles, rigadoons, and sometimes they waltz. At our request, however, two young ladies of the house volunteered to execute the bolero one evening; but, before they commenced, they took care to close the door and windows of the patio, which are generally left open, so afraid were they of being accused of bad taste and local colouring. In general, the Spaniards grow angry on being spoken to of cachuchas, castanets, majos, manolas, monks, smugglers, and bull-fights, though they have, in reality, a great liking for all these things, so truly national and characteristic. They ask you, with an air of apparent vexation, if you do not think that they are as far advanced in civilization as yourself? To such an extent has the deplorable mania of imitating everything, French or English, penetrated everywhere! At present, Spain represents the Voltaire-Touquet system and the Constitutionnel of 1825; that is, it is hostile to all colouring and to all poetry. Be it remembered, however, that we are only speaking of the self-styled enlightened class inhabiting the cities.

As soon as the quadrilles are over, you take your leave by saying, "A los pies de vd." to the lady of the house, and "Beso À vd. la mano" to her husband; to which they reply, "Buenas noches," and "Beso À vd. la suya:" and then again on the threshold, as a last adieu, "Hasta maÑana" (till to-morrow); which is an invitation to return. In spite of their familiar ways, the people of even the lower classes, the peasants and vagrants, make use towards one another of the most exquisite urbanity, which forms a strong contrast with the uncouthness of our own rabble. It is true that a stab might be the result of an offensive expression, and this is certainly one way of making all interlocutors use a good deal of circumspection. It is worthy of remark that French politeness, formerly proverbial, has disappeared since swords have ceased to be worn. The laws against duelling will end by making us the rudest nation in the world.

On returning home, you meet, under the windows and balconies, numbers of young gallants enveloped in their hooded cloaks, and staying there to pelar la paba (pluck the turkey), that is, to talk with their novias through the bars. These nocturnal conversations often last till two or three o'clock in the morning, which is nothing astonishing, since the Spaniards spend a part of the day in sleep. You sometimes tumble also on a serenade composed of three or four musicians, but more generally of the sighing swain only, who sings couplets as he accompanies himself on the guitar, with his sombrero drawn over his eyes, and his feet resting on a stone or a step. Formerly two serenades in the same street would not have been tolerated. The first comer claimed the right of remaining there alone, and forbade every other guitar, except his own, to tinkle in silence of the night. Such pretensions were maintained at the point of the sword, or by the knife, unless the patrol happened to be passing. In this case the two rivals coalesced, in order to charge the patrol, with the understanding that they were to renew their own private combat by and by. The susceptibility of serenaders has greatly diminished, and every one can at present tranquilly rascar el jamon (scrape the ham) under the window of his mistress.

If the night is dark you must take care not to put your foot into the stomach of some honourable hidalgo, rolled up in his mantle, which serves him for garment, bed, and house. During the summer nights the granite steps of the theatre are covered with a mass of blackguards who have no other place to go to. Each of them has his particular step, which serves as his apartment, where he is always sure to be found. They sleep there under the blue vault of heaven, with the stars for night lights, with no bugs to annoy them, and defy the sting of the mosquito by the coriaceous nature of their tanned skin, which is bronzed by the fiery sun of Andalusia, and certainly quite as dark as that of the darkest mulattoes.

The following is, without much variation, the life we led. The morning was devoted to visiting different parts of the city, to a walk to the Alhambra or the Generalife; we then went, of necessity, to call on the ladies at whose houses we had passed the previous evening. When we called but twice a day they told us we were ungrateful, and received us with so much kindness that we came to the conclusion that we really were fierce savage beings, and extremely negligent.

Our passion for the Alhambra was such that, not satisfied with visiting it every day, we were desirous of altogether taking up our abode there; not, however, in the neighbouring houses, which are let at very high prices to the English, but in the palace itself; and, thanks to the interest of our Granadian friends, the authorities, without giving us formal permission, promised not to perceive us. We remained there four days and four nights, which constituted, without any doubt, the happiest moments of my existence.

In order to reach the Alhambra, we will pass, if you please, through the square of the Vivarambla, where Gazal, the valiant Moor, used to hunt the bull, and where the houses, with their wooden balconies and miradores, present a vague appearance of so many hen-coops. The fish-market occupies one corner of the square, the middle of which forms an open space, surrounded with stone seats, peopled with money-changers, vendors of alcarrazas, earthen pots, water melons, mercery, ballads, knives, chaplets, and other little articles that can be sold in the open air. The Zacatin, which has preserved its picturesque name, connects the Vivarambla with the Plaza Nueva. It is in this street, bordered by lateral lanes, and covered with canvass tendidos, that all the commerce of Granada moves and buzzes; hatters, tailors, and shoemakers, lacemen and cloth merchants, occupy nearly all the shops, which possess as yet nothing of the improvements of modern art, and remind you of the old pillars of the Paris markets.

The Zacatin is always crowded. Now you meet a group of students on a tour from Salamanca, playing the guitar, the tambourine, castanets, and triangle, while they sing couplets full of fun and animation; then again your eye encounters a gang of gipsy women, with their blue flounced dresses studded with stars, their long yellow shawls, their hair in disorder, and their necks encircled with big coral or amber necklaces, or a file of donkeys loaded with enormous jars, and driven by a peasant from the Vega, as sun-burnt as an African.

The Zacatin leads into the Plaza Nueva, one side of which is taken up by the splendid palace of the Chancellor, remarkable for its columns of rustic order and the severe richness of its architecture. As soon as you have crossed the place, you begin to ascend the Calle de los Gomeres, at the end of which you find yourself on the limits of the jurisdiction of the Alhambra, and face to face with the Puerta de Granada, named Bib Leuxar by the Moors, with the Vermilion Towers on its right, built, as the learned world declares, on Phoenician sub-structures, and inhabited at present by basket-makers and potters.

Before proceeding further, we ought to warn our readers, who may perhaps think our descriptions, though scrupulously exact, beneath the idea they have formed of the Alhambra, that this palace and fortress of the ancient Moorish kings is very far from presenting the appearance lent to it by the imagination. We expected to see terrace superposed on terrace, open-worked minarets, and rows of boundless colonnades. But nothing of all this really exists: outside, there are only to be seen large massive towers of the colour of bricks or toasted bread, built at different epochs by Arabian princes; and within, all you see is a suite of chambers and galleries, decorated with extreme delicacy, but with nothing grand about them. Having made these remarks, we will continue our route.

After having passed the Puerta de Granada, you find yourself within the bounds of the fortress and under the jurisdiction of a special governor. There are two routes marked out in a wood of lofty trees. Let us take the one to the left, which leads to the fountain of Charles the Fifth: it is the steeper of the two, but then it is the shorter and the more picturesque. Water flows along rapidly in small trenches paved with kelp, and spreads around the bottom of the trees, which nearly all belong to species peculiar to the north, and the verdancy of which is of such moisture as to be truly delicious at so short a distance from Africa. The noise of the murmuring water joins itself to the hoarse hum of a hundred thousand grasshoppers or crickets, whose music never ceases, and which forcibly reminds you, in spite of the coolness of the place, of southern and torrid climes. Water springs forth everywhere; from beneath the trunks of the trees and through the cracks in the old walls. The hotter it is, the more abundant are the springs, for it is the snow which supplies them. This mixture of water, snow, and fire, renders the Granadian climate unparalleled throughout the world, and makes Granada a real terrestrial paradise; without being Moors, we might well have had applied to us, when we appeared oppressed by deep melancholy, the Arabian saying—"He is thinking of Granada."

At the end of the road, which continues to rise, you meet a large monumental fountain, which serves as a shouldering-piece, raised to the memory of the emperor Charles the Fifth: it is covered with numerous devices, coats of arms, names of victories, imperial eagles, mythological medallions, is of a heavy imposing richness, and in the Romanic-German style. Two shields, bearing the arms of the house of Mondejar, announce that Don Luis de Mendoza, marquis of this title, raised the monument in honour of the red-bearded CÆsar. This fountain, which is solidly constructed, supports the ascent which leads to the Gate of Justice, through which you enter the Alhambra proper.

The Gate of Justice was built by King Yusef Abul Hagiag, about the year of our Lord 1348: it owes its name to the custom the Mussulmans have of rendering justice on the threshold of their palaces; this custom possesses the advantage of being very majestic, and of allowing no one to enter the inner courts; for the maxim of Monsieur Royer-Collard, which says that "Private life ought to be walled in," was invented ages ago by the inhabitants of the East—that country of the sun, whence all light and wisdom come.

The name of tower might be given more properly than that of gate to this construction of King Yusef Abul Hagiag; for it is in reality a large square tower, rather high, and through which there is a large hollow arch in the form of a heart, to which a hieroglyphic key and hand, cut in two separate stones, impart a stern and cabalistic air. The key is a symbol held in great veneration by the Arabs, on account of a verse in the Koran beginning with the words "He has opened," and of several other hermetic significations; the hand is destined to destroy the influence of the Evil Eye, the jettatura, like the little coral hands which they wear at Naples as pins or watch appendages, to avert the power of sinister looks. There was an ancient prediction which asserted that Granada would never be taken until the hand had seized the key: it must be owned, however, to the shame of the prophet, that the two hieroglyphics are still in the same places; and that Boabdil, el rey chico, as he was called on account of his small stature, uttered outside the walls of conquered Granada the historical groan, suspiro del Moro, which has given its name to a rock of the Sierra de Elvira.

This massive and embattled tower, glazed with orange and red on a stiff sky-blue ground, and having behind it a whole abyss of vegetation, with the city built on a precipice, while beyond it are long ranges of mountains streaked with a thousand hues, like those of African porphyry, forms a truly majestic and splendid entrance to the Arabian palace. Under the gate is a guard-house, and poor ragged soldiers now take their siesta in the same place where the caliphs, seated on sofas of gold brocade, with their black eyes motionless in their marble faces and their hands buried in the folds of their silky beards, listened with a thoughtful and solemn air to the complaints of the believers. An altar, surmounted by an image of the Virgin, stands against the wall, as if to sanctify at the very entrance this ancient abode of the worshippers of Mahomet.

When you have passed through the gate, you enter a vast place called the Plaza de las Algives, in the middle of which is a well whose curb is surrounded by a sort of wooden shed covered with esparto-work, where you can go, for a cuarto, and drink large glasses of water as clear as a diamond, as cold as ice, and of the most delicious taste. The towers of Quebrada, the Homenaga, the Armeria, and of the Vela, whose bell announces the time at which the water is distributed; and stone parapets on which you can lean, in order to admire the wonderful view that stretches itself before you, surround one side of the place; the other side is occupied by the palace of Charles the Fifth, an immense monument of the Renaissance which would be admired anywhere else, but which is wished anywhere but here when you think that it covers a space once belonging to a part of the Alhambra, that was pulled down on purpose to make room for this heavy mass. This alcazar was designed, however, by Alonzo Berruguete: the trophies, bas-reliefs, and medallions on its faÇade have been executed with patience by a bold and spirited hand: the circular court with its marble columns, where the bull-fights, doubtless, took place, is certainly a magnificent piece of architecture, but non erat hic locus.

You enter the Alhambra by a corridor running through an angle of the palace of Charles the Fifth, and after a few windings you arrive at a large court indifferently known by the names of Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of Myrtles), of the Alberca (of the Reservoir), or of the Mezouar, an Arabian word signifying a bath for women.

On coming from these obscure passages into this large space inundated with light, you feel an effect similar to that produced by a diorama. It appears to you that an enchanter's wand has carried you to the East of four or five centuries back. Time, which changes all things in its progress, has in no way modified the aspect of these places, where the apparition of one of the old Moorish sultans, and of Tarfe the Moor in his white cloak, would not cause the least surprise.

In the middle of the court there is a large reservoir three or four feet deep, in the form of a parallelogram, bordered by two large beds of myrtles and shrubs, and terminated at each end by a sort of gallery, with slender columns supporting Moorish arches of very delicate workmanship. Fountains, the over-abundant water of which is conducted from the basins to the reservoir through a marble gutter, are placed under each gallery, and complete the symmetry of the decorations. To the left are the archives, and the chamber where, to the shame of the Granadians, is stowed away, among all sorts of rubbish, the magnificent vase of the Alhambra, a monument of inestimable rareness, nearly four feet in height, covered with ornaments and inscriptions, and fitted in itself to form the glory of a museum, but which Spanish heedlessness allows to lie uncared-for in an ignoble hole. One of the wings which form the handles was broken off a little time back. On this side also are passages leading to an ancient mosque, converted into a church under the protection of St. Mary of the Alhambra, at the time of the conquest. To the right are the rooms of the attendants, where the head of some dark Andalusian servantmaid, looking out of a narrow Moorish casement, now and then produces a very pleasing Oriental effect. At the bottom, above the ugly roof of round tiles, which have replaced the gilt tiles and cedar-beams of the Arabian roof, rises majestically the tower of Comares, the embattlements of which boldly shoot forth their vermilion denticulations into the beautifully limpid vault of heaven. This tower contains the Hall of Ambassadors, and communicates with the Patio de los Arrayanes by a sort of antechamber called the Barca, on account of its form.

The antechamber of the Hall of Ambassadors is worthy of its purpose; the nobleness of its arcades, the variety and interweavings of its arabesques, the mosaic-work of its walls, the delicacy of its stuccoed roof, furrowed like the stalactite ceiling of a grotto, painted blue, green, and yellow, of which there are still some traces left, form a whole of the most charming originality and strangeness.

On each side of the door leading to the Hall of Ambassadors, in the jamb itself of the arcade, and above the coating of varnished glass which decorates the lower part of the walls, and which is divided into triangles of glaring colours, are two white marble niches, looking like little chapels, and sculptured in a most delicate manner. It was here that the ancient Moors used to leave their slippers before entering, as a mark of deference, just as we take off our hat in places we respect.

The Hall of Ambassadors, one of the largest of the Alhambra, occupies all the interior of the tower of Comares. The roof, which is cedar, is full of those mathematical combinations so familiar to Arabian architects: all the pieces are placed so that their salient or re-entering angles form a great variety of designs; the walls disappear beneath a network of ornaments so close together, and so inextricably interwoven, that they can be compared to nothing more fitly than to several pieces of guipure placed one over another. Gothic architecture, with its stone lacework, and its open-worked roses, is nothing to this. Fish-knives, and paper embroidery executed with a fly-press, like that which confectioners use to cover their bonbons with, can alone give you an idea of it. One of the characteristics of the Moorish style is that it offers very few projections or profiles. All this ornamental work is executed on smooth surfaces, and scarcely ever projects more than four or five inches; it resembles a kind of tapestry worked on the wall itself. It has, too, one very distinguishing feature, and this is, the employment of writing as a means of decoration. It is true that Arabian writing, with its mysterious forms and distortions, is admirably fitted for this use. The inscriptions, which are nearly always suras of the Koran, or eulogiums on the different princes who have built and decorated the halls, are placed along the friezes, on the jambs of the doors, and round the arches of the windows, and are interspersed with flowers, foliage, net-work, and all the riches of Arabian calligraphy. Those in the Hall of Ambassadors signify "Glory to God, power and riches to believers;" or they sing the praises of Abu Nazar, who, "if he had been taken alive into heaven, would have made the brightness of the stars and planets pale"—a hyperbolical assertion, which seems to us rather too oriental. Other rows of inscriptions are filled with eulogiums of Abi Abd Allah, another sultan, who helped to build this part of the palace. The windows are loaded with pieces of poetry in honour of the limpidness of the waters of the reservoir, of the blooming condition of the shrubs, and of the perfume of the flowers that ornament the yard of the Mezouar, which is seen from the Hall of Ambassadors through the door and columns of the gallery.

The loopholes, with their interior balconies at a great height from the ground, and the roof of wood-work without any other ornaments but the zigzags and the cross-work formed by the placing of the timber, give the Hall of Ambassadors a severer aspect than the other halls of the palace have, but which is more in harmony with the purpose it was intended for. From the window at the back there is a beautiful view over the ravine of the Darro.

Now that we have given this description, we think it our duty to destroy another illusion. All these magnificent things are made neither of marble nor of alabaster, nor even of stone, but simply of plaster! This interferes very much with the ideas of fairy splendour that the name alone of the Alhambra creates in the most positive imaginations; but it is true, for all that. With the exception of the columns, which are nearly all made of a single piece, and which are hardly ever more than from six to eight feet in height, of a few flag-stones, of the smaller basins of the fountains, and of the little chapels where the slippers used to be left, there has not been a single bit of marble employed in the construction of the Alhambra. The same thing may be said of the Generalife: the Arabs surpassed all other nations in the art of moulding, hardening, and carving plaster, which acquired in their hands the firmness of stucco, without having its disagreeable shiny appearance.

The greater part of these ornaments were made in casts, so that they could be reproduced without any great trouble as often as the symmetry of the place required it. Nothing would be easier than to reproduce an exact likeness of any hall of the Alhambra; to do this, it would suffice to take casts of all the ornaments contained in it. Two arcades of the Hall of Justice, which had fallen down, have been reconstructed by some Granadian workmen, in a manner which leaves nothing to be desired. If we were anything of a millionaire, one of our fancies would be to have a duplicate of the Court of Lions in one of our parks.

On leaving the Hall of Ambassadors, you follow a passage of modern structure, comparatively speaking, and you arrive at the tocador, or dressing-room of the queen. This is a small pavilion situated on the top of a tower, which formerly served the sultanas for an oratory, whence you enjoy the sight of an admirable panorama. At the entrance you perceive a slab of white marble, perforated with small holes to allow the smoke of the perfumes that were burnt beneath the floor to pass through. On the walls are still seen some fantastic frescoes, executed by Bartholomew de Ragis, Alonzo Perez, and Juan de la Fuente. On the frieze the ciphers of Isabella and Philip V. are intertwined, one with another, together with groups of Cupids. It is impossible to conceive anything more coquettish or charming than this closet, suspended as it is, with its little Moorish pillars, and its surbased arches, over an abyss of azure, the bottom of which is studded with the house-tops of Granada, and whither the breeze wafts the perfumes of the Generalife, that enormous tuft of rose-bays blooming on the brow of the neighbouring hills, and the plaintive cry of the peacocks walking on the dismantled walls. How many hours have I not spent there, wrapped in that serene melancholy so different from the melancholy of the north, with one leg dangling over the precipice, and straining my eyes in order to leave unexamined no form or contour of the picture that lay before them, and which they will, doubtless, never see again. No pen or pencil will ever be able to give a true idea of that brilliancy, of that light, of that vividness of hues. The most commonplace tones assume the appearance of jewels, and everything is on the same scale. Towards the end of the day, when the sun is oblique, the most inconceivable effects are produced: the mountains sparkle like heaps of rubies, topazes and carbuncles; dust, which looks like dust of gold, fills the intervals, and if, as is often the case in summer, the labourers are burning stubble in the plain, the smoke, while rising slowly towards the sky, borrows the most magical reflections from the rays of the setting sun. I am surprised that Spanish painters, have, in general, made their pictures so dark, and have almost exclusively employed themselves in imitating Caravaggio and the masters of the sombre school. The pictures of Decamps and Marilhat, who only painted views of Asia or Africa, give a truer idea of Spain than all the pictures fetched, at a great expense, from the Peninsula.

We will traverse the garden of Lindaraja without stopping, for it is nothing but an uncultivated piece of ground, strewed with rubbish, and bristling with brushwood; we will therefore visit, for an instant, the Bath-room of the Sultana, which is coated with square pieces of mosaic-work of glazed clay, and bordered with filigree-work that would make the most complicated madrepores blush. A fountain is in the middle of the room, and two alcoves are in the wall. It was here that the Moorish Sultanas used to come to repose themselves on square pieces of golden cloth, after having enjoyed the pleasure and luxury of an oriental bath. The galleries or balconies, in which the singers and musicians used to be placed, are still seen, and are at a height of about fifteen feet from the ground. The baths themselves resemble large troughs, and each of them is made out of one piece of white marble; they are placed in little vaulted closets, lighted by open-worked stars or roses. For fear of becoming irksome by repetition, we will not speak of the Hall of Secrets, whose acoustic powers are productive of a very curious effect, and the corners of whose walls are blackened by the noses of those inquisitive persons who go and whisper, in one corner, some impertinence that is faithfully carried to another; nor of the Hall of the Nymphs, over the door of which is an excellent bas-relief of Jupiter changed into a swan and caressing Leda, and which said bas-relief is most extraordinarily free in its composition, and very audacious in its execution; nor of the apartments of Charles the Fifth, which are in a dreadful state of devastation, and which possess nothing curious, with the exception of their roofs, studded with the ambitious device of Non plus ultra; but we will go direct to the Court of Lions, the most curious and best preserved part of the Alhambra.

English engravings and the numerous drawings which have been published of the Court of Lions convey but a very incomplete and false idea of it: nearly all of them fail to give the proper proportions, and, in consequence of the over-loading necessitated by the fact of representing the infinite details of Arabian architecture, suggest the idea of a monument of much greater importance.

The Court of Lions is a hundred and twenty feet long, seventy-three broad, while the galleries which surround it are not more than twenty-two feet high. They are formed by a hundred and twenty-eight columns of white marble placed in a symmetrical disorder of four and four, and of three and three, together: these columns, the capitals of which are full of work and still preserve traces of gold and colour, support arches of extreme elegance and of quite a unique shape.

On entering, the Hall of Justice, the roof of which is a monument of art of the most inestimable rarity and worth, immediately attracts your attention, as it forms the back of the parallelogram. There you see the only Arabian pictures, perhaps, which have come down to us. One of them represents the Court of Lions itself, with the fountain, which is very apparent, but gilt: some personages, whom the oldness of the painting does not allow you to distinguish clearly, seem to be engaged in a joust or passage of arms.

The subject of the other appears to be a sort of divan where the Moorish kings of Granada are assembled, and whose white burnous, olive-coloured faces, red mouths, and mysteriously dark eyes, are still easily discernible. These paintings, as is asserted, are executed on prepared leather, pasted on cedar panels, and serve to prove that the precept of the Koran which forbids the likenesses of animated beings being taken was not always scrupulously observed by the Moors, even if the twelve lions of the fountain were not there to confirm this assertion.

To the left, halfway up the gallery, is the Hall of the Two Sisters, which is the fellow to the Hall of the Abencerrages. This name of las Dos Hermanas is given it from two immense flagstones of white Macael marble, equal in size and perfectly alike, which form part of the pavement. The vaulted roof, or cupola, which the Spaniards expressively call media naranja (half an orange), is a miracle of work and patience. It is like a honeycomb, or the stalactites of a grotto, or the bunches of soap-bubbles which children blow out through a straw. The myriads of little vaults, of domes three or four feet high which grow out of one another, crossing and intersecting each other's edges, seem rather the effect of fortuitous crystallization than the work of a human hand; the blue, red, and green in the hollows of the mouldings are still nearly as bright as if they had only just been put on. The walls, like those of the Hall of Ambassadors, are covered, from the frieze to the height of a man, with stucco-work of the most complicated and delicate description. The bottom of the walls is coated with those square pieces of glazed clay of which the black, yellow, and green angles, combined with the white ground, form a mosaic-work. The middle of the apartment, according to the invariable custom of the Arabs, whose habitations seem to be nothing but large ornamented fountains, is occupied by a basin and a jet of water. There are four fountains under the Gate of Justice, a like number under the entrance-gate, and another in the Hall of the Abencerrages, without counting the Taza de los Leones, which, not satisfied with vomiting water through the mouths of its twelve monsters, throws up another torrent towards the sky out of the cap which surmounts it. All this water flows through small trenches made in the flooring of the halls and the pavement of the courts, to the foot of the Fountain of Lions, where it disappears in a subterraneous conduit. This is certainly a kind of dwelling in which you would never be annoyed by the dust, and it is a matter of conjecture how these halls could be inhabited in the winter. The large cedar doors were no doubt then shut, the marble floor was perhaps covered with a thick carpet, and fires of fruit-stones and odoriferous wood lighted in the braseros, and it was thus that the return of the fine season was waited for, which is never long in coming at Granada.

We will not describe the Hall of the Abencerrages, which is almost similar to that of the Two Sisters, and contains nothing particular, with the exception of its ancient door of wood arranged in lozenges, which dates from the time of the Moors. At the Alcazar of Seville there is another one made exactly in the same style.

The Taza de los Leones enjoys, in Arabian poetry, a wonderful reputation, and no terms of praise are thought too high for these superb animals: I must own, however, that it would be difficult to find anything less resembling lions than these productions of African fancy; the paws are mere wedges, similar to those bits of wood, of hardly any shape, which are used to thrust into the bellies of paste-board dogs to make them keep their equilibrium; the muzzles, streaked with transversal lines, doubtless to represent the whiskers, are exactly like the snout of a hippopotamus; and the eyes are designed in so primitive a manner, that they remind you of the shapeless attempts of children. Nevertheless, these twelve lions, if we look upon them not as lions, but as chimeras, as a caprice in ornamenting, produce, with the basins they support, a picturesque effect full of elegance, which aids you to comprehend their reputation, and the praises contained in the following Arabian inscription, of twenty-four verses of twenty-two syllables each, engraved on the sides of the basin into which the waters of the upper basin fall. We ask our readers' pardon for the somewhat barbarous fidelity of the translation:—

"O you who gaze on the lions fixed to their places! remark that they only require life to be perfect. And you to whom this Alcazar and this kingdom fall as an inheritance, take them from the noble hands who have governed them, without displeasure and without resistance. May God preserve you for the work which you come to perform, and protect you for ever from the revenge of your enemy! Honour and glory be yours. O Mohammed! our king, endowed with great virtues, by the aid of which you have conquered all! May God never permit this fine garden, the image of your virtues, to have a rival that surpasses it! The substance which tints the basin of the fountain is like mother-of-pearl beneath the clear sparkling water; the flowing stream resembles melting silver, for the limpidness of the water and the whiteness of the stone have no equals; they might be likened unto a drop of transparent essence on a face of alabaster. It would be difficult to follow its course. Look at the water and look at the basin, and you will not be able to distinguish whether it is the water that is motionless or the marble that ripples. Like the prisoner of love, whose visage is covered with vexation and fear by the look of the envious, so is the jealous water indignant at the stone, and the stone envious of the water. To this inexhaustible stream may be compared the hand of our king, who is as liberal and as generous as the lion is valiant and strong."

It was in the basin of the Fountain of Lions that the heads of the thirty-six Abencerrages, whom the Zegris had drawn there by stratagem, fell. The rest of the Abencerrages would have shared the same fate, had it not been for the devotedness of a little page, who ran at the risk of his life to warn them against entering the fatal court. On having your attention directed to the bottom of the basin, you perceive large reddish spots, an indelible accusation left by the victims against their executioners. Unfortunately, the erudite world declares that the Abencerrages and the Zegris have never existed. With respect to this I am completely guided by romances, popular traditions, and the novel of Monsieur de ChÂteaubriand, and I firmly believe that these purple-looking marks are blood and not rust.

We had established our head-quarters in the Court of Lions; our furniture consisted of two mattresses, which we rolled up in a corner in the day-time, of a brass lamp, of an earthenware jar, and of a few bottles of sherry that we kept in a fountain to render the wine cool. We slept one night in the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the next in that of the Abencerrages, but it was not without some slight fear, as I lay stretched on my cloak, that I looked at the white rays of the moon, which appeared quite astonished at crossing the yellow and flickering flame of a lamp, shoot through the openings of the roof into the water of the basin and across the shining ground.

The popular traditions collected by Washington Irving in his "Tales of the Alhambra," now came into my mind; the stories of the "Headless Horse" and of the "Hairy Phantom," gravely related by Father Echeverria, appeared to me very probable, above all, when the light was out. The likelihood of the legends appears much greater in the night-time, when these dark places are filled with uncertain reflections, which give to all objects of a vague outline a fantastic appearance: doubt is the son of the day, faith the daughter of the night; and what astonishes me is, that St. Thomas believed in our Saviour after having felt his wound. I am not sure that I myself did not see the Abencerrages walking about in the moonlight, with their heads under their arms, along the galleries; at all events, the shadows of the columns assumed forms diabolically suspicious, and the breeze, as it passed through the arcades, so resembled the breathing of a human being, that it made you doubt.

One Sunday morning, about four or five o'clock, we felt ourselves, while yet asleep, inundated on our mattresses with a fine and soaking rain. This was owing to the conduits of the water-jets having opened earlier than usual, in honour of a prince of Saxe Coburg, who was come to view the Alhambra, and who, they said, was to marry the young queen, as soon as she was of age.

We had scarcely time to rise and dress before the prince arrived, with two or three persons of his suite. He was half mad with rage. The keepers, in order to receive him in a proper manner, had fitted to every fountain the most ridiculous pieces of mechanism and hydraulic instruments imaginable. One of these inventions aimed, by the means of a little white tin carriage and lead soldiers, which were turned by the force of the water, at representing the journey of the queen to Valencia. You may judge of the prince's satisfaction at this ingenious and constitutional piece of refinement. The Fray Gerundio, a satirical journal of Madrid, persecuted this poor prince with marked animosity. It taxed him, among other crimes, with haggling too much about the charges in his hotel bills, and with having appeared at the theatre in the costume of a majo, with a pointed hat on his head.

A party of Granadians came to spend the day at the Alhambra; there were seven or eight young and pretty women, and five or six cavaliers. They danced to the guitar, played at different games, and sung in chorus, to a delightful air, a song by Fray Luis de Leon, which has become very popular throughout Andalusia. As the water-jets had stopped through having begun to shoot forth their silver streams too early, and as the basins were dry, the giddy young girls seated themselves in a round on the edge of the alabaster basin of the Hall of the Two Sisters, so as to form a kind of flower-basket, and, throwing back their pretty heads, again took up simultaneously the burden of their song.

The Generalife is situated at a little distance from the Alhambra, on a pass of the same mountain. Access is gained to it by a kind of hollow road, that traverses the ravine of Los Molinos, which is bordered with fig-trees, having enormous shiny leaves, with palm oaks, pistachio-trees, laurels, and rock roses, of a remarkably exuberant nature. The ground is composed of yellow sand teeming with water, and of wonderful fecundity. Nothing is more delightful than to follow this road, which appears as if it ran through a virgin forest of America, to such an extent is it obstructed with foliage and flowers, and such is the overwhelming perfume of the aromatic plants you inhale there. Vines start through the cracks of the crumbling walls, and from all their branches hang fantastic runners, and leaves resembling Arabian ornaments in the beauty of their form; the aloe opens its fan of azured blades, and the orange-tree twists its knotty wood, and clings with its fang-like roots to the rents in the steep sides of the ravine. Everything here flourishes and blooms in luxuriant disorder, full of the most charming effects of chance. A wandering jasmine-branch introduces a white star among the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate-tree; and a laurel shoots from one side of the road to the other to embrace a cactus, in spite of its thorns. Nature, abandoned to herself, seems to pride herself on her coquetry, and to wish to show how far even the most exquisite and finished art always remains behind her.

After a quarter of an hour's walk, you come to the Generalife, which is, so to say, nothing but the casa de campo, the country-house of the Alhambra. The exterior of it, like that of all oriental buildings, is very simple: large walls without windows, and surmounted by a terrace with a gallery divided into arcades, the whole being crowned with a small modern belvedere, constitute its architecture. Of the Generalife nothing now remains but some arcades, and some large panels of arabesques, unfortunately clogged with layers of whitewash, which have been applied again and again with all the obstinacy and despair of cleanliness. Little by little have the delicate sculptures and the wonderful guilloches of these remains become filled up, until they have at last disappeared. What is at present nothing but a faintly-vermiculated wall, was formerly open lace-work, as fine as those ivory leaves which the patience of the Chinese carves for ladies' fans. The brush of the whitewasher has caused more chefs-d'oeuvre to disappear than the scythe of Time, if we may be allowed to make use of this mythological expression. In a pretty well preserved hall is a suite of smoky portraits of the kings of Spain, but the only merit they possess is a chronological one.

The real charm of the Generalife consists in its gardens and its waters. A canal, paved with marble, runs through the whole length of the enclosure, and rolls its rapid and abundant waters beneath a series of arcades of foliage, formed by twisting and curiously-cut yews. Orange-trees and cypresses are planted on each side of it. It was at the foot of one of these cypresses, which is of a prodigious bulk, and which dates from the time of the Moors, that the favourite of Boabdil, if we are to believe the legend, often proved that bolts and bars are but slight guarantees for the virtue of sultanas. There is one thing, at least, very certain, and that is, that the yew is very thick, and very old.

The perspective is terminated by a porticoed gallery, ornamented with jets of water and marble columns, like the patio of myrtles of the Alhambra. The canal suddenly makes a turn, and you then enter some other places embellished with pieces of water, and the walls of which still preserve traces of the frescoes of the sixteenth century, representing rustic pieces of architecture, and distant views. In the midst of one of the basins, a gigantic rose-bay, of the most incomparable beauty and splendour, is seen to bloom, like an immense flower-basket. At the time when I saw it, it appeared like an explosion of flowers, or the bouquet of a display of vegetable fireworks; its aspect, too, is so blooming and luxuriant, so glaring, if we may be allowed the expression, that it makes the hue of the most vermilion rose appear insipid. Its lovely flowers, shot with all the ardour of desire high up into the pure blue space of the heavens; and its noble-looking leaves, shaped expressly by nature to form a crown for the glorious deeds of heroism, and sprinkled by the spray of the water-jets, sparkled like emeralds glittering in the sun. Never did anything inspire me with a higher sentiment of the beautiful than this rose-bay of the Generalife.

The water is brought to the gardens along a sort of steep acclivity, bordered with little walls, forming on each side a kind of parapet, that support trenches of large hollow tiles, through which the water runs beneath the open sky with the most gay and lively murmur in the world. On each footpace, well-supplied water-jets burst forth from the middle of little basins, and shoot their crystal aigrettes into the thick foliage of the wood of laurels, the branches of which cross and recross one another above them. The mountain streams with water on every side; at each step a spring starts forth, and you continually hear at your side the murmuring of some rivulet, turned out of its course, going to supply some fountain with water, or to carry bloom and verdure to the foot of a tree. The Arabs have carried the art of irrigation to the highest point; their hydraulic works attest the most advanced state of civilization; these works still exist; and it is to them that Granada owes the reputation it has of being the Paradise of Spain, and the fact of its enjoying eternal spring in an African temperature. An arm of the Darro has been turned out of its course by the Arabs, and carried for more than two leagues along the hill of the Alhambra.

From the Belvedere of the Generalife you can plainly perceive the configuration of the Alhambra, with its line of reddish, half-demolished towers, and its remaining pieces of wall, which rise and descend according to the undulations of the mountain. The palace of Charles the Fifth, which is not seen from the side of the city stamps its square and heavy mass, which the sun gilds with a white reflection, on the damask-like sides of the Sierra Neveda, whose white ridges stand out on the horizon in a singular manner. The steeple of Saint Mary's marks its Christian outline above the Moorish embattlements. A few cypresses thrust their mournful leaves through the cracks of the walls, surrounded by all this light and azure, like a melancholy thought in the midst of a joyful fÊte. The slopes of the hill running down towards the Darro, and the ravine of Los Molinos, disappear beneath an ocean of verdure. It is one of the finest views that can well be imagined.

On the other side, as if to form a contrast with so much verdancy, rises an uncultivated, scorched up, tawny mountain, tinged with dashes of red and yellow ochre; this mountain is called La Silla del Moro, on account of a few remains of some buildings on its summit. It was there that king Boabdil used to view the Arabian horsemen jousting in the Vega with the Christian knights. The recollection of the Moors is still vivid at Granada. You would think that they had quitted the city but yesterday, and, if we may judge by what remains of them, it is really a pity that they ever quitted it at all. What southern Spain requires is African civilization, and not the civilization of Europe, which is not suited to the heat of the climate or to the passions it inspires. Constitutional mechanism can only agree with the temperate zones; above a heat of eighty degrees charters melt or blow up.

As we have now done with the Alhambra and the Generalife, we will traverse the ravine of the Darro, and take a look as we go along the road leading to Monte Sagrado, at the dens of the gitanos, who are pretty numerous at Granada. This road is made through the hill of the Albaycin, which overhangs on one side. Gigantic Indian fig-trees, and enormous nopals raise their prickly heads, of the colour of verdigris, along its impoverished and white-coloured slopes; under the roots of these large unctuous plants, which seem to supply the place of chevaux-de-frise and spiked fences, are dug in the living rock, the dwellings of the gipsies. The entrance to these caverns is whitewashed; a light cord on which hangs a piece of frayed-out tapestry, serves as a door. It is there that the wild race swarms and multiplies; there, children, whose skins are darker than Havannah cigars, play in a state of nudity before the door, without any distinction as to sex, and roll themselves in the dust while uttering sharp and guttural cries. The gitanos are generally blacksmiths, mule-shearers, veterinary doctors, and, above all, horse-dealers. They have a thousand receipts for putting mettle and strength into the most broken-winded and limping animals in the world: a gitano would have made Rozinante gallop, and Sancho's ass would have caracoled under their hands. Their real trade, however, is that of stealing.

The gitanas sell amulets, tell fortunes, and follow those suspicious callings inherent to the women of their race. I saw very few pretty ones, though their faces were remarkable both by their type and character. Their swarthy complexion contrasts strongly with the limpidness of their oriental eyes, the fire of which is tempered by an indescribable and mysterious melancholy, only to be compared to the look inspired by the recollection of a country that is lost to us for ever, or of former grandeur. Their mouth, which is rather thick and deeply coloured, reminds you of the blooming nature of African mouths; the smallness of their forehead, and the curved form of their nose, pronounce them to be of the same origin with the tzigones of Wallachia and Bohemia, and with all the children of that fantastic people which traversed, under the generic name of Egyptians, the whole of the society of the Middle Ages, and the enigmatical filiation of which century upon century has not been able to interrupt. Nearly all of them possess so much natural majesty and freedom in their deportment, and are so well and firmly set, that in spite of their rags, their dirt, and their misery, they seem to be conscious of the antiquity and purity of their race, and ever to remember that it is free from all alloy, for these gipsies never marry but among themselves, and those children which are the offsprings of temporary unions are unmercifully cast out of the tribe. One of the pretensions of the gitanos is that of being good Castilians and good Catholics, but I think that, at bottom, they are, to some extent, Arabs and Mahometans; they deny this fact to the best of their power, from a remnant of fear for the Inquisition which no longer exists. A few deserted and half-ruined streets of the Albaycin are also inhabited by richer or less wandering gipsies. In one of these streets, we perceived a little girl, about eight years old, and entirely naked, dancing the zorongo on a painted paving stone. Her sister, whose features were wan and emaciated, and in whose citron-looking face sparkled eyes of fire, was crouched beside her on the ground, with a guitar, from the strings of which she drew forth a monotonous tinkle by running her thumb over them, and producing music not unsimilar to the husky squeak of the grasshopper. The mother, who was richly dressed, and whose neck was loaded with glass beads, beat time with the end of a blue velvet slipper, which she gazed on with great complacency. The wild attitude, strange accoutrement, and extraordinary colour of this group, would have made a subject for the pencil of Collot, or of Salvator Rosa.

Monte Sagrado, which contains the grottoes of the martyrs who were so miraculously discovered, offers nothing very interesting. It is a convent with a rather ordinary-looking church, beneath which the crypts are dug. These crypts have nothing about them capable of producing any deep impression. They are composed of a complication of small, straight, whitewashed corridors, from seven to eight feet high. In recesses made for the purpose, altars, dressed with more devotion than taste, have been raised. It is there that the shrines and bones of the holy personages are locked up behind the wire-work. I expected to see a subterraneous church, dark and mysterious, nay, even dreadful-looking, with low pillars, and a surbased roof, lighted by the uncertain reflection of a distant lamp,—something, in fact, similar to the ancient catacombs, and great was my surprise at the clean and tidy appearance of this whitewashed crypt, lighted by ventholes like those of a cellar. We somewhat superficial Catholics require something picturesque, in order to get imbued with religious feeling. The devout man thinks little about the effect of light and shade, or about the more or less learned proportions of architecture; he knows, however, that, beneath that altar of so mediocre a form, lie hidden the bones of the saint who died for the sake of the faith which he professes, and that suffices for him.

The Carthusian Convent, at present bereft of monks, like all other convents in Spain, is an admirable edifice, and we cannot regret too much that it has ever ceased to be used for its original purpose. We have never been able to understand what harm could be done by cenobites voluntarily cloistered in a prison, and passing their lives in austerity and prayer, especially in a country like Spain, where there is certainly no lack of ground.

You ascend by a double flight of steps to the doorway of the church: it is surmounted by a white marble statue of St. Bruno, of a rather handsome effect. The decorations of the church are singular, and consist of plaster arabesques, truly wonderful by the variety and richness of their subjects. It appears as if the architect had been desirous of vying, in quite a different style, with the lightness and complication of the lace-work of the Alhambra. There is not a place as large as your hand, in this immense structure, which is not filled with flowers, damask-work, leaves, and guilloches: it would be enough to turn the head of any one who wanted to take an exact sketch of it. The choir is lined with porphyry and costly marble. A few mediocre pictures are hung up here and there along the walls, and make you regret the space they hide. The cemetery is near the church: according to the custom of the Carthusian friars, no tomb, no cross, indicates the place where the departed brothers sleep; but the cells surround the cemetery, and each one is provided with a little garden. In a piece of ground planted with trees, which, no doubt, formerly served as a promenade for the friars, my attention was called to a kind of fish-pond, with a sloping stone edge, in which were awkwardly crawling three or four dozen tortoises, that basked in the sun and appeared quite happy at being henceforth in no danger of the cook's art. The laws of the Carthusian brethren forbade their ever eating meat, and the tortoise is looked on as a fish by casuists. These tortoises were destined to supply the friars' table. The revolution, however, saved them.

While we are about visiting the convents, we will enter, if you please, the Monastery of San Juan de Dios. The cloister is one of the most curious imaginable, and is constructed with frightfully bad taste; the walls, painted in fresco, represent various fine actions of the life of San Juan de Dios, framed with such grotesque and fantastic ornaments as throw into the shade the most extravagant and deformed productions of Japan and China. You behold sirens playing the violin, she-monkeys at their toilet, chimerical fish in still more chimerical waves, flowers which look like birds, birds which look like flowers, lozenges of looking-glass, squares of earthenware, love-knots—in a word, an endless pell-mell of all that is inextricable. The church, which is luckily of another epoch, is gilt nearly all over. The altar-screen, which is supported by pillars of the Solomonic order, produces a rich and majestic effect. The sacristan, who served as our guide, on seeing that we were French, questioned us about our country, and asked if it were true, as was said at Granada, that Nicholas, the Emperor of Russia, had invaded France and taken possession of Paris: such was the latest news. These gross absurdities were spread among the people by the partisans of Don Carlos, in order to obtain credence for an absolutist reaction on the part of the European powers, and to rally, by the hope of speedy assistance, the drooping courage of the disorganized bands.

I saw in this church a sight that made a deep impression on me; it was an old woman crawling on her knees from the door to the altar: her arms were stretched out as stiff as stakes, in the form of a cross, her head was thrown back, her upturned eyes allowed the whites only of them to be seen, her lips were firmly closed, and her face was shiny and of the colour of lead: this was ecstasy turned to catalepsy. Never did Zurbaban execute anything more ascetic or possessing more feverish ardour. She was accomplishing a penance ordered by her confessor, and had still four more days of it to undergo.

The Convent of San Geronimo, now transformed into barracks, contains a Gothic cloister with two arteries of arcades of rare character and beauty. The capitals of the columns are ornamented with foliage and fantastic animals of the most capricious nature and charming workmanship. The church, at present profaned and deserted, exhibits the peculiarity of having all its ornaments and architectural reliefs painted in imitation on grey grounds, like the roof of the Bourse, instead of being executed in reality: here lies interred Gonzalvo of Cordova, surnamed the great captain. His sword used to be preserved there, but it was lately taken away and sold for a few duras, the value of the silver which ornamented the handle. It is thus that many objects, valuable as works of art or from associations, have disappeared without any other profit to the thieves than the pleasure of doing wrong. It appears to us that our revolution might be imitated in something else but its stupid Vandalism. It is this sentiment we all experience on visiting a tenantless convent, on beholding so many ruins and such devastation, the utter loss of so many chefs d'oeuvre of every kind, and the long work of centuries destroyed and swept away in an instant. No one has the power to prejudge the future: I, however, doubt if it will restore what the past had bequeathed us, and which we destroy as if we possessed wherewithal to replace it. In addition to this something might be put on one side, for the globe is not so covered with monuments that it is necessary for us to raise new buildings on the ruins of the old ones. With such reflections was my mind filled, as I wandered, in the Antequerula, through the old convent of San Domingo. The chapel was decorated with a profusion of all sorts of gewgaws, baubles, and gilding. It was one mass of wreathed columns, volutes, scroll-work, encrusted work of various coloured breccia, glass mosaics, checker-work of mother-of-pearl, and burgau, bevilled mirrors, suns surrounded by rays, transparencies, and all the most preposterous, misshapen, ugly, and strange embellishments that the depraved taste of the eighteenth century and the horror of straight lines could invent. The library, which has been preserved, is almost exclusively composed of folios and quartos bound in white vellum, with the titles written on them in black or red ink. They consist, for the most part, of theological treatises, casuistical dissertations, and other scholastic productions, possessing but little attraction for the mere literary man. A collection of pictures has been formed at the convent of San Domingo, composed of works from the various monasteries that were either abolished or suffered to go to ruin, but, with the exception of some few fine heads of ascetics, and a few representations of martyrs which seem to have been painted by the hangman himself, from the proficiency in the art of torturing which they exhibit, there is nothing remarkably good, which proves that the persons who were guilty of these acts of pillage are excellent judges of paintings, for they never fail to keep the best things for themselves. The courtyards and cloisters are admirable, and are adorned with fountains, orange-trees, and flowers.

How excellently are such places adapted for reverie, meditation, and study, and what a pity is it that convents were ever inhabited by monks, and not by poets! The gardens, left to themselves, have assumed a wild, savage aspect; luxuriant vegetation has invaded the walks, and Nature has regained possession of her own, planting a tuft of flowers or grass in the place of every stone that has fallen out. The most remarkable feature in these gardens is an alley of enormous laurels, forming a covered walk which is paved with white marble, and furnished, on each side, with a long seat of the same material, with a slanting back. At certain distances from each other, a number of small fountains maintain a refreshing coolness beneath this thick vault of verdure, at the end of which you have a splendid view of a portion of the Sierra Nevada, through a charming Moorish mirador, which forms part of an old Arabic palace, enclosed in the convent. This pavilion is said to have communicated, by means of long subterranean galleries, with the Alhambra, which is situated at some considerable distance. However, this is an idea deeply rooted in the minds of the inhabitants of Granada, where the least Moorish ruin is always presented with five or six leagues of subterranean passages as well as a treasure, guarded by some spell or other.

We often went to San Domingo to sit beneath the shade of the laurels and bathe in a pool, near which, if the satirical songs are to be believed, the monks used to lead no very reputable sort of life. It is a remarkable fact, that the most Catholic countries are always those in which the priests and monks are treated most cavalierly; the Spanish songs and stories about the clergy rival, in licence, the facetiÆ of Rabelais and Beroalde de Verville, and to judge by the manner in which all the ceremonies of the church are parodied in the old pieces, one would hardly think that the Inquisition had ever existed.

Talking of baths, I will here relate a little incident which proves that the thermal art, carried to so high a degree of perfection by the Arabs, has lost much of its former splendour in Granada. Our guide took us to some baths that appeared very well managed, the rooms being situated round a patio shaded by a covering of vine-leaves, while a large reservoir of very limpid water occupied the greater part of the patio. So far all was well; but of what do you think the baths themselves were made? Of copper, zinc, stone, or wood? Not a bit of it, you are wrong; I will tell you at once, for you will never guess. They were enormous clay jars, like those made to hold oil. These novel baths were about two-thirds buried in the ground. Before potting ourselves in them we had the inside covered with a clean cloth, a piece of precaution which struck the attendant as something so extremely strange, and which astonished him so profoundly, that we were obliged to repeat the order several times before he would obey it. He explained this whim of ours to his own satisfaction by shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head in a commiserative manner as he pronounced in a low voice the one word: Ingleses! There we sat, squatted down in our oil jars, with our heads stuck out at the top, something like pheasants en terrine, cutting rather grotesque figures. It was on this occasion that I understood for the first time the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which had always struck me as being rather difficult to believe, and had made me for an instant doubt the veracity of the "Thousand-and-One Nights."

There are, also, in the Albaycin, some old Moorish baths, and a pond covered over with a vaulted roof, pierced by a number of little holes in the shape of stars, but they are not in working order, and you can get nothing but cold water.

This is about all that is to be seen at Granada, during a stay of some weeks. Public amusements are scarce. The theatre is closed during the summer; the bull-fights do not take place at any fixed periods; there are no clubs or establishments of this description, and the Lyceum is the only place where it is possible to see the French and other foreign papers. On certain days, there is a meeting of the members, when they read papers on various subjects as well as poetry, besides singing and playing pieces, generally written by some young author of the company.

Every one employs his time, most conscientiously, in doing nothing. Gallantry, cigarettes, the manufacture of quatrains and octaves, and especially card-playing, are found sufficient to fill up a man's existence very agreeably. In Granada you see nothing of that furious restlessness, that necessity for action and change of place which torments the people of the north. The Spanish struck me as being very philosophical. They attach hardly any importance to material life, and are totally indifferent about comfort. The thousand factitious wants created by the civilization of northern countries, appear to them puerile and troublesome refinements. Not having to protect themselves continually against the climate, the advantages of the English home have no attractions in their eyes. What do people, who would cheerfully pay for a breeze or a draught of air, if they could obtain such a thing, care whether or not the windows close properly? Favoured by a beautiful sky, they have reduced human existence to its simplest expression: this sobriety and moderation in everything enables them to enjoy a large amount of liberty, a state of extreme independence; they have time enough to live, which we cannot say that we have. Spaniards cannot understand how a man can labour first in order to rest afterwards. They very much prefer pursuing an opposite course, and I think that by so doing, they show their superior sense. A workman who has gained a few reals leaves his work, throws his fine embroidered jacket over his shoulders, takes his guitar and goes and dances or makes love to the majas of his acquaintance, until he has not a single cuarto left; he then returns to his employment. An Andalusian can live splendidly for three or four sous a day; for this sum he can have the whitest bread, an enormous slice of water-melon, and a small glass of aniseed, while his lodging costs him nothing more than the trouble of spreading his cloak upon the ground under some portico or the arch of some bridge. As a general rule, Spaniards consider work as something humiliating and unworthy of a freeman, which, in my opinion, is a very natural and very reasonable idea, since Heaven wishing to punish man for his disobedience, found no greater infliction than the obliging him to gain his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. Pleasures procured, as ours are, by dint of labour, fatigue, and mental anxiety and perseverance strike Spaniards as being bought much too dearly. Like all people who lead a simple life approaching a state of nature, they possess a correctness of judgment which makes them despise the artificial enjoyments of society. Any one coming from Paris or London, those two whirlpools of devouring activity, of feverish and unnaturally excited energy, is greatly surprised by the mode of life of the people of Granada,—a mode of life that is all leisure, filled up with conversation, siestas, promenades, music, and dancing. The stranger is astonished at the happy calmness, the tranquil dignity of the faces he sees around him. No one has that busy look which is noticeable in the persons hurrying through the streets of Paris. Every one strolls leisurely along, choosing the shady side of the street, stopping to chat with his friends, and betraying no desire to arrive at his destination in the shortest possible time. The certitude of not being able to make money extinguishes all ambition: there is no chance of a young man making a brilliant career. The most adventurous among them go to Manilla or Havannah, or enter the army, but on account of the piteous state of the public finances, they sometimes wait for years without hearing anything about pay. Convinced of the inutility of exertion, Spaniards do not endeavour to make fortunes, for they know that such things are quite out of the question; and they therefore pass their time in a delightful state of idleness, favoured by the beauty of the country and the heat of the climate.

I saw nothing of Spanish pride; nothing is so deceptive as the reputation bestowed on individuals and nations. On the contrary, I found them exceedingly simple-minded and good-natured; Spain is the true country of equality, if not in words at least in deeds. The poorest beggar lights his papelito at the puro of a powerful nobleman, who allows him to do so, without the slightest affectation of condescension; a marchioness will step, with a smile, over the bodies of the ragged vagabonds who are slumbering across her threshold, and, when travelling, will not make a face if compelled to drink out of the same glass as the mayoral, the zagul, and the escopetero of the diligence. Foreigners find great difficulty in accustoming themselves to this familiarity, especially the English, who have their letters brought upon salvers, and take them with tongs. An Englishman travelling from Seville to Jeres, told his calesero to go and get his dinner in the kitchen. The calesero, who, in his own mind, thought he was honouring a heretic very highly by sitting down at the same table with him, did not make the slightest remark, and concealed his rage as carefully as the villain in a melodrama; but about three or four leagues from Jeres, in the midst of a frightful desert, full of quagmires and bushes, he threw the Englishman very neatly out of the vehicle, shouting to him as he whipped on his horse: "My lord, you did not think me worthy of sitting at your table, and I, Don Jose Balbino Bustamente y Orozco, do not think you good enough to sit on the seat in my calesin. Good evening!"

The servants, both male and female, are treated with a gentle familiarity very different from our affected civility, which seems, every moment, to remind them of the inferiority of their condition. A short example will prove the truth of this assertion. We had gone to a party given at the country-house of the SeÑora ——; in the evening, there was a general desire to have a little dancing, but there were a great many more ladies than gentlemen present. To obviate this difficulty, the SeÑora —— sent for the gardener and another servant, who danced the whole evening without the least awkwardness, false bashfulness, or servile forwardness, but just as if they had been on a perfect equality with the rest of the company. They invited, in turn, the fairest and most noble ladies present, and the latter complied with their request in the most graceful manner possible. Our democrats are very far from having attained this practical equality, and our most determined Republicans would revolt at the idea of figuring in a quadrille, opposite a peasant or a footman.

Of course, there are a great many exceptions to these remarks, as there are to all other generalities. There are, doubtless, many Spaniards who are active, laborious, and sensible to all the refinements of life, but what I have said conveys the general impression felt by a traveller after a stay of some little time,—an impression which is often more correct than that of a native observer, who is less struck by the novelty of the various circumstances.

As our curiosity was satisfied with regard to Granada and its buildings, we resolved, from having had a view of the Sierra Nevada at every turn we took, to become more intimately acquainted with it, and endeavour to ascend the Mulhacen, which is the most elevated point of the whole range. Our friends at first attempted to dissuade us from this project, which was really attended with some little danger, but, on seeing that our resolution was fixed, they recommended us a huntsman named Alexandro Romero, as a person thoroughly acquainted with the mountains, and possessing every qualification to act as guide. He came and saw us at our casa de pupilos, and his manly, frank physiognomy, immediately pre-possessed us in his favour. He wore an old velvet waistcoat, a red woollen sash, and white linen gaiters, like those of the Valencians, which enabled you to see his clean-made, nervous legs, tanned like Cordovan leather. Alpargatas of twisted rope served him for shoes, while a little Andalusian hat, that had grown red from exposure to the sun, a carbine and a powder-flask, slung across his shoulder, completed his costume. He undertook to make all the necessary preparations for our expedition, and promised to bring, at three o'clock, the next morning, the four horses we required, one for my travelling companion, one for myself, a third for a young German who had joined our caravan, and a fourth for our servant, who was intrusted with the direction of the culinary department. As for Romero he was to walk. Our provisions consisted of a ham, some roast fowls, some chocolate, bread, lemons, sugar, and a large leathern sack, called a bota, filled with excellent Val-de-PeÑas, which was the principal article in the list.

At the appointed hour, the horses were before our house, while Romero was hammering away at the door with the butt-end of his carbine. Still scarcely awake, we mounted our steeds, and the procession set forth, our guide running on beforehand to point out the road. Although it was already light, the sun had not risen, and the undulating outlines of the smaller hills, which we had passed, were spread out all around us, cool, limpid and blue, like the waves of an immovable ocean. In the distance, Granada had disappeared beneath the vapourized atmosphere. When the fiery globe at last appeared on the horizon, all the hill-tops were covered with a rosy tint, like so many young girls at the sight of their lovers, and appeared to experience a feeling of bashful confusion at the idea of having been seen in their morning dÉshabille. The ridges of the mountain are connected with the plain by gentle slopes, forming the first table-land which is easily accessible. When we reached this place, our guide decided that we should allow our horses a little breathing time, give them something to eat, and breakfast ourselves. We ensconced ourselves at the foot of a rock, near a little spring, the water of which was as bright as a diamond, and sparkled beneath the emerald-coloured grass. Romero, with all the dexterity of an American savage, improvised a fire with a handful of brush-wood, while Louis prepared some chocolate, which, with the addition of a slice of ham and a draught of wine, composed our first meal in the mountains. While our breakfast was cooking, a superb viper passed beside us, and appeared surprised and dissatisfied at our installing ourselves on his estate, a fact that he gave us to understand by unpolitely hissing at us, for which he was rewarded by a sturdy thrust with a sword-stick through the stomach. A little bird, that had watched the proceedings very attentively, no sooner saw the viper disabled, than it flew up with the feathers of its neck standing on end, its eye all fire, and flapping its wings, and piping in a strange state of exultation. Every time that any portion of the venomous beast writhed convulsively, the bird shrunk back, soon returning to the charge, however, and pecking the viper with its beak, after which it would rise in the air three or four feet. I do not know what the serpent could have done, during its lifetime, to the bird, or what was the feeling of hatred we had gratified by killing the viper, but it is certain that I never beheld such an amount of delight.

We once again set out. From time to time we met a string of little asses coming down from the higher parts of the mountains with their load of snow, which they were carrying to Granada for the day's consumption. The drivers saluted us, as they passed by, with the time honoured "Vayan Ustedes con Dios," and we replied by some joke about their merchandise, which would never accompany them as far as the city, and which they would be obliged to sell to the official who was entrusted with the duty of watering the public streets.

We were always preceded by Romero, who leaped from stone to stone with the agility of a chamois, and kept exclaiming, Bueno camino (a good road). I should certainly very much like to know what the worthy fellow would call a bad road, for, as far as I was concerned, I could not perceive the slightest sign of any road at all. To our right and left, as far as the eye could distinguish, yawned delightful abysses, very blue, very azure and very vapoury, varying in depth from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet, a difference, however, about which we troubled our heads very little, for a few dozen fathoms more or less made very little difference in the matter. I recollect with a shudder a certain pass, three or four pistol-shots long and two feet broad,—a sort of natural plank running between two gulfs. As my horse headed the procession, I had to pass first over this kind of tight-rope, which would have made the most determined acrobats pause and reflect. At certain points there was only just enough space for my horse's feet, and each of my legs was dangling over a separate abyss. I sat motionless in my saddle, as upright as if I had been balancing a chair on the end of my nose. This pass, which took us a few minutes to traverse, struck me as particularly long.

When I quietly reflect on this incredible ascent, I am lost in surprise, as at the remembrance of some incoherent dream. We passed over spots where a goat would have hesitated to set its foot, and scaled precipices so steep that the ears of our horses touched our chins. Our road lay between rocks and blocks of stone, which threatened to fall down upon us every moment, and ran in zigzags along the edge of the most frightful precipices. We took advantage of every favourable opportunity, and although advancing slowly we still advanced, gradually approaching the goal of our ambition,—namely, the summit, that we had lost sight of since we had been in the mountains, because each separate piece of table-land hides the one above it.

Every time our horses stopped to take breath, we turned round in our saddles to contemplate the immense panorama formed by the circular canvas of the horizon. The mountain tops which lay below us looked as if they had been marked out in a large map. The Vega of Granada and all Andalusia presented the appearance of an azure sea, in the midst of which a few white points that caught the rays of the sun, represented the sails of the different vessels. The neighbouring eminences that were completely bare, and cracked, and split from top to bottom, were tinged in the shade with a green-ash colour, Egyptian blue, lilac and pearl-grey, while in the sunshine they assumed a most admirable and warm hue similar to that of orange peel, tarnished gold or a lion's skin. Nothing gives you so good an idea of a chaos, of a world still in the course of creation, as a mountain range seen from its highest point. It seems as if a nation of Titans had been endeavouring to build some sacrilegious Babel, some prodigious Lylac or other; that they had heaped together all the materials and commenced the gigantic terraces, when suddenly the breath of some unknown being had, like a tempest, swept over the temples and palaces they had begun, shaking their foundations and levelling them with the ground. You might fancy yourself amidst the remains of an antediluvian Babylon, a pre-Adamite city. The enormous blocks, the Pharaoh-like masses, awake in your breast thoughts of a race of giants that has now disappeared, so visibly is the old age of the world written in deep wrinkles on the bald front and rugged face of these millennial mountains.

We had reached the region inhabited by the eagles. Several times, at a distance, we saw one of these noble birds perched upon a solitary rock, with its eye turned towards the sun, and immersed in that state of contemplative ecstasy which with animals replaces thought. There was one of them floating at an immense height above us, and seemingly motionless in the midst of a sea of light. Romero could not resist the pleasure of sending him a visiting card in the shape of a bullet. It carried away one of the large feathers of his wing, but the eagle, nothing moved, continued on his way with indescribable majesty, as if nothing had happened. The feather whirled round and round for a long time before reaching the earth; it was picked up by Romero, who stuck it in his hat.

Thin streaks of snow now began to show themselves, scattered here and there, in the shade; the air became more rarified and the rocks more steep and precipitous; soon afterwards, the snow appeared in immense sheets and enormous heaps which the sun was no longer strong enough to melt. We were above the sources of the Gruil, which we perceived like a blue ribband frosted with silver, streaming down with all possible speed in the direction of its beloved city. The table-land on which we stood is about nine thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is the highest spot in the range with the exception of the peak of Veleta and the Mulhacen, which towers another thousand feet towards the immeasurable height of heaven. On this spot Romero decided that we should pass the night. The horses, who were worn out with fatigue, were unsaddled; Louis and the guide tore up a quantity of brushwood, roots, and juniper plants to make a fire, for although in the plain the thermometer stood at thirty or thirty-five degrees, there was a freshness on the heights we then occupied, which we knew would settle down into intense cold as soon as the sun had set. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon; my companion and the young German determined to take advantage of the daylight that remained, to scale alone and on foot the last heights of the mountain. For my own part, I preferred stopping behind; my soul was moved by the grand and sublime spectacle before me, and I busied myself in scribbling in my pocket-book sundry verses, which, if not well turned, had, at least, the merit of being the only alexandrines composed at such an elevation. After my strophes were finished, I manufactured some sorbets with snow, sugar, lemon and brandy, for our dessert. Our encampment presented rather a picturesque appearance; our saddles served us for seats, and our cloaks for a carpet, while a large heap of snow protected us from the wind. A fire of broom blazed brightly in the centre, and we fed it by throwing in, from time to time, a fresh branch which shrivelled up and hissed, darting out its sap in little streams of all colours. Above us, the horses stretched forward their thin heads, with their sad, gentle eyes, and caught an occasional puff of warmth.

Night was rapidly approaching. The least elevated mountains were the first to sink into obscurity, and the light, like a fisherman flying before the rising tide, leapt from peak to peak, retiring towards the highest in order to escape from the shade which was advancing from the valleys beneath and burying everything in its bluish waves. The last ray which stopt on the summit of the Mulhacen hesitated for an instant; then, spreading out its golden wings, winged its way like some bird of flame into the depths of heaven and disappeared. The obscurity was now complete, and the increased brilliancy of our fire caused a number of grotesque shadows to dance about upon the sides of the rocks. Eugene and the German had not returned, and I began to grow anxious on their account; I feared that they might have fallen down some precipice or been buried beneath some mass of snow. Romero and Louis already requested me to sign a declaration to the effect that they had neither murdered nor robbed the two worthy gentlemen, and that, if the latter were dead, it was their own fault.

Meanwhile, we tore our lungs to pieces by indulging in the most shrill and savage cries, to let them know the position of our wig-wam, in case they should not be able to perceive the fire. At last the report of firearms, which was hurled back by all the echoes of the mountains, told us that we had been heard, and that our companions were but a short distance off—in fact, at the expiration of a few minutes, they made their appearance, fatigued and worn out, asserting that they had distinctly seen Africa on the other side of the ocean; it is very possible they had done so, for the air of these parts is so pure, that the eye can perceive objects at the distance of thirty or forty leagues. We were all very merry at supper, and by dint of playing the bagpipes with our skin of wine, we made it almost as flat as the wallet of a Castilian beggar. It was agreed that each of us should sit up in turn to attend the fire, an arrangement which was faithfully carried out, but the circumference of our circle, which was at first pretty considerable, kept becoming smaller and smaller. Every hour the cold became more intense, and at last we literally laid ourselves in the fire itself, so as to burn our shoes and pantaloons. Louis gave vent to his feelings in loud exclamations; he bewailed his gaspacho (cold garlic soup), his house, his bed, and even his wife. He made himself a formal promise, by everything he reverenced, never to be caught a second time attempting an ascent; he asserted that mountains are far more interesting when seen from below, and that a man must be a maniac to expose himself to the chance of breaking every bone in his body a hundred thousand times, and having his nose frozen off in the middle of the month of August, in Andalusia, and in sight of Africa. All night long he did nothing but grumble and groan in the same manner, and we could not succeed in reducing him to silence. Romero said nothing, and yet his dress was made of thin linen, and all that he had to wrap round him was a narrow piece of cloth.

At last the dawn appeared; we were enveloped in a cloud, and Romero advised us to begin our descent, if we wished to reach Granada before night. When it was sufficiently light to enable us to distinguish the various objects, I observed that Eugene was as red as a lobster nicely boiled, and at the same moment he made an analogous observation with respect to me, and did not feel himself bound to conceal the fact. The young German and Louis were also equally red; Romero alone had reserved his peculiar tint, which resembled, by the way, that of a boot-top, and although his legs of bronze were naked, they had not undergone the slightest alteration. It was the biting cold and the rarefaction of the air that had turned us this colour. Going up a mountain is nothing, because you look at the objects above you, but coming down, with the awful depths before your eyes, is quite a different matter. At first the thing appeared impracticable, and Louis began screeching like a jay who is being picked alive. However, we could not remain for ever on the Mulhacen, which is as little adapted for the purpose of habitation as any place in the known world, and so, with Romero at our head, we began our descent. It would be impossible, without laying ourselves open to the charge of exaggeration, to convey any notion of the paths, or rather the absence of paths, by which our dare-devil of a guide conducted us; never more break-neck obstacles crowded together in the course marked out for any steeple-chase, and I entertain strong doubts as to whether the feats of any "gentlemen riders" ever outrivalled our exploits on the Mulhacen. The Montagnes Russes were mild declivities in comparison to the precipices with which we had to do. We were almost constantly standing up in our stirrups, and leaning back over the cruppers of our horses, in order to avoid performing an incessant succession of parabolas over their heads. All the lines of perspective seem jumbled up together; the streams appeared to be flowing up towards their source, the rocks vacillated and staggered on their bases, and the most distant objects appeared to be only two paces off; we had lost all feeling of proportion, an effect which is very common in the mountains, where the enormous size of the masses, and the vertical position of the different ranges, do not allow of your judging distances in the ordinary manner.

In spite of every difficulty we reached Granada without our horses having even made one false step, only they had got but one shoe left among them all. Andalusian horses—and ours were of the most authentic description—cannot be equalled for mountain travelling. They are so docile, so patient, and so intelligent, that the best thing the rider can do is to throw the reins on their necks and let them follow their own impulse.

We were impatiently expected, for our friends in the city had seen our fire burning like a beacon on the table-land of Mulhacen. I wanted to go and give an account of our perilous expedition to the charming Senoras B——, but I was so fatigued that I fell asleep on a chair, holding my stocking in my hand, and I did not wake before ten o'clock the following morning, when I was still in the same position. Some few days afterwards, we quitted Granada, sighing quite as deeply as ever King Boabdil did.