far above their
Christian rivals! No wonder they plunged, despairing, into the deserts
they had left, mingling among savage races as some bright spring mingles
with a dark subterranean river, never to glitter in the light again.

But none of my day dreams cheated me into losing count of time.

If my messenger were true, soon Monica would be in one of the _patios_ of
Carmona's palace, looking up at the Alhambra towers. "The middle window as
you go into the Hall of the Ambassadors," I repeated, and found my way
back through the court of the Alberca; for you do not need to know the
Alhambra to find your way from _sala_ to _sala_, seen a hundred times in
imagination.

So beautiful had I guessed that room above all others, that I had not
expected to be surprised; yet I was surprised, and oddly excited, for
supreme beauty is always exciting to the Latin mind. A vast bower of
jewels, and old point-lace embroidered with tarnished gold threads and
yellowing pearls, it seemed; its portals lace-curtained too; rich hanging
folds of lace and fringe, like the lifted drapery of a sultan's tent,
supported on delicate poles of polished ivory.

Behind me was the beryl block of the fish-pond, set in silver instead of
marble by the sunshine in the court. Before me, across the pink-jewelled
dusk of the Sala de los Ambajadores, a blue and green picture of sky and
mountains was framed by lace and precious stones.

I walked to the middle window and looked sheer down over tall tree-tops to
the valley of the Darro, where the roofs of the Albaicin clustered
together, softly grey and glistening as the ruffled plumage of nestling
birds.

Far away to the left lay the Vega, shimmering under a mist of heat, which
gave the look of a crystal sea engulfing the plain, trees and scattered
villages gleaming through the transparent flood. Straight before my eyes,
on the cactus-clothed shoulder of a hill opposite the tower, glittered a
splash of whitewash dotted with black holes, which were the doors and
windows of gypsy caverns. And above me, to the right on a higher hillside,
rose the towers and miradores of that ancient "summer palace of delights,"
the Generalife.

One sweeping glance gave me these details; then, adjusting the field-glass
I had brought, I fixed my attention on a house near the Albaicin, which I
easily identified as Carmona's palace.

Gazing down from such a height, I had a bird's-eye view of double _patios_
thick with clustering