Charles V., his Palace 



boled trees, which slopes up to the level of the hill, and 

 expands into gardens and gravel-walk parades. You enter 

 by a Janus-faced gate at the bottom (it is of a tolerable 

 Christian aspect out, and indifferent Moorish inside), and 

 you see some dingy red towers peeping down through the 

 trees on either band. There are three paths, but you turn 

 to the left, slanting zig-zag up the steep side of the corry. 

 After a while you get to a Moorish archway in a tall red 

 tower. Over the gateway is the magic hand, engraved like 

 an Egyptian hieroglyphic in the stone. You go up a shab- 

 byish passage, open to the sky, and come out in a large 

 courtyard at the top of the hill. Here you see before you 

 the square yellow sandstone palace, begun by Charles V. 

 The inside is unfinished, and through one of its round win- 

 dows we saw a goat skip across a gap between two blocks of 

 unfinished stonework. Behind this great solecism, and 

 tacked on to it anyhow, without any attempt at harmony, or 

 even straightness, are the remains of the palace of the 

 Moorish kings of Granada, which I will not stop here to 

 describe. They run along the precipice-edge above the 

 deep ravine, at whose bottom murmurs the Darro. It is 

 only seen from this valley that the Alhambra presents any 

 remarkable beauty on the outside. 



And here sitting, after sunset, among the slender marble 

 shafts of the breezy galleries, it is, to a certain degree, a 

 realisation of romance to watch the stars glimmering out of 

 the darkening sky, and the lamps from the blackening town 

 below, and to say to one's self: "This is the Alhambra. 

 This is the palace of dreams which Washington Irving set 

 up in our imaginations, sculptured with more graceful 

 forms, painted with richer colours, and enamelled with 

 brighter azulejos and tarkeeshes^ than even the cunning 

 man could accomplish, or the lavish Ibnulahmar could pay 



231 



