now becoming Granada, and quickening my slow
old emotions to a youthful glow. At the station, which, in spite of
Boabdil el Chico and Ferdinand and Isabel, was quite like every other
railway station of southern Europe, we parted friends with our Spanish
fellow-traveler, whom we left smoking and who is probably smoking still.
Then we mounted with our Swedish friends into the omnibus of the hotel
we had chosen and which began, after discreet delays, to climb the hill
town toward the Alhambra through a commonplace-looking town gay with
the lights of cafes and shops, and to lose itself in the more congenial
darkness of narrower streets barred with moonlight. It was drawn by four
mules, covered with bells and constantly coaxed and cursed by at least
two drivers on the box, while a vigorous boy ran alongside and lashed
their legs without ceasing till we reached the shelf where our hotel
perched.

III

I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in
the house, or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which
I could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and
looked down and over the most beautiful, the most magnificent scene that
eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. Beside us and before us
the silver cup of the Sierra Nevada, which held the city in its tiled
hollow, poured it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine
which brightened and darkened its spread in a thousand radiances
and obscurities of windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking
gardens. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say
now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine
moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges
honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the
wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it
dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it
had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang
of pure ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, and closed
the window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not
latch, and we were obliged to ring for a _camerero_ to come and see what
ailed it.

[Illustration: 27 TO THE ALHAMBRA]

The infirmity of the door-latch was emblematic of a temperamental
infirmity in the whole hotel. The promises were those of Madrid, but the
performances were those o