s and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic
resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their
ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second period
that Irving had to treat.

VI

The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the
unparalleled beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect
of art, the inspiration of its founders is affirmed by their choice of
an outlook which commands one of the most magnificent panoramas in the
whole world. It would be useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think
of far-off silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away
from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and towers,
and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and orchards and
forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective; think of steep and
sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, and one
crooked stream stealing snakelike in their depths; think of whatever
splendid impossible dramas of topography that you will, of a tremendous
map outstretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have some
notion of the prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and
perhaps not. Of one thing we made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the
Darro, and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the traveler visits
at the risk of his life in order to have his fortune told. At the same
moment we made sure that we should not go nearer it, for though we knew
that it was insurpassably dirty as well as dangerous, we remembered so
distinctly the loathsomeness of the gipsy quarter at Seville that we
felt no desire to put it to the comparison.

We preferred rather the bird's-eye study of the beautiful Generalife
which our outlook enabled us to make, and which we supplemented by
a visit the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our
hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers up and
down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so steep that
at a certain point the electric current no longer suffices, and the car
bites into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under-jaw and
so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, with a conductor so
affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt after
a single day we should soon become brothers, or at least step-brothers.
Whenever we left or took his car, after the beginning or ending of the
cogway, he was al