never would disaster come until the Hand had grasped the Key, I knew that
this must be the Gate of Justice.

Now, a spell fell upon me. It was as if the Hand had come down to touch me
on the shoulder, and give the Key to hidden wonders, which only I might be
allowed to see. That was the fiction with which I pleased myself; for he
who comes to the most famous of places is as truly a discoverer as he who
finds a new world. No matter how much he has read, how many faithful
photographs seen, he must discover everything anew, since it is certain
that nowhere will he find anything more than he has within himself. The
picture he sees will fit the frame his mind can give, and no one ever has,
no one ever will, see there exactly what he sees. If a man's mind cannot
create a beautiful frame, then the picture must have but a poor effect for
him, and he will go away belittling it.

Now, I believed that I had been making a fine jewelled frame for this
picture of the Alhambra, and I hoped that I deserved the Key which the
Hand had lent.

Inside the gateway, when I had climbed a winding lane, I found myself in
the great Place of the Cisterns, which, with the vast incongruous palace
half finished by Charles the Fifth, I recognized from many pictures; but
not yet would I look down over Granada and the Vega. I would wait until I
could stand at a window in the Hall of the Ambassadors and see what I had
been promised. So, without a glance over the parapet, I walked on to an
open door, where stood two or three men in gold-laced hats. One moved
resignedly forward to act as guide, but a word and a piece of silver
convinced him that I was a person who might be trusted alone, though I
lacked a student's ticket.

I passed through the room devoted to officialdom, and then--the time had
come to use the key, for I was already in fairyland; the covers of the
"Arabian Nights" had closed on me, and shut me in between the pages.

Physically I was not alone; for there were faded and strident tourists in
the marble-paved court of the Alberca, whom I fain would have had stopped
outside and put into appropriate costume for fairyland; but spiritually I
had the place to myself.

The little glittering fish, like tropical flowers under green glass,
flashed towards me through the beryl water, just as ancestor fish had
flashed when jewelled hands of harem beauties crumbled cake into the
gleaming tank. My mother had told me a legend, that fair favourites o