city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to a church on
the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to which the garden
clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably
thrilling; but the best view of the city is from the flowery walk that
runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is
now a garden, long forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra
palace. From this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history
and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were very
critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I should not
mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in the world.

XI

Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides
the cold which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the
excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was the
production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense interest for
Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the Alhambra at one of the
highest moments of its history, and the persons were some of those
dearest to its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of course
the first company in Spain) had been in the hotel overnight, and the
ladies of it had gleamed and gloomed through the cold corridors, but the
poet had been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful
and blond, and powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a
violet cast. There was not so much a question of whether we should
take tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful
influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially given
up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be ashamed to
confess it. They were for the afternoon performance, and at three
o'clock we went with the rest of the gay and great world of Granada to
the principal theater.

The Latin conception of a theater is of something rather more barnlike
than ours, but this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and
when we had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon
us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already thronged.
The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the gallery under the
roof was loud with the impatience for the play which the auditors
there testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until the curtain
lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all round the theater