And that gap in the mountains is the pass where Moor and Christian, the Cross and Crescent, have encountered each other in murderous fight, when knights in armor met hand to hand, and in protracted battles far more bloody and fierce than in our modern warfare they contended for the possession of this beautiful vale.
It is called the _vega_, or the plain, and from the watch-tower on which we are now standing we have the best view of it. Two rivers, like those that watered Paradise, flow across it,—the Darro, which the Moors called Hadaroh and the Romans Calom, and the Genil, which the ancients knew as the river Singilis. This fertile and beautiful plain stretches thirty miles or more away from the city of Granada, like a vast amphitheatre, a prairie sea: now and then a white cluster of houses, a little village, like an island on the surface of this great ocean of corn and wine. The snow-clad heights of Sierra Nevada rise to the bluest of blue heavens that cover it as an infinite dome, and the five-hundred-towered city stands on this rocky height in the midst of this magnificent panorama, the green meadows and vineyards of the _vega_ below, the white-capped mountains around, and the cerulean skies, so pure, so deep, so lovingly bending over and embracing the whole.
But the bell on the watch-tower answers a better purpose than merely to ring husbands for the lively Spanish girls. This plain is to be watered by these rivers, and they must be led away from their own banks by artificial channels to the thousands of plantations into which it is divided. But the rivers are not sufficient to allow the continuous flow of water through all these canals for irrigation, and the time and quantity of water are regulated by law. Each man has his water-gate, through which the stream is to come, and the hour when he is to open his gate and when to close is announced from the tower. At the stroke of one, all within a certain distance open their gates, and the water flows in upon their fields, until the bell strikes again, when they close, and the next open theirs, and so the supply is extended from one to another and the whole plain is watered.
The “Sigh of the Moor” is the name of that mountain in the south-east horizon, on the way to the sea-coast, and it gets its name from the tradition that when the last of the Moorish kings, the unhappy Boabdil of whom we have been speaking often, was flying from the city, he paused here, and as he looked back upon Granada “he saw a light cloud of smoke burst from the beautiful and beloved Alhambra, and presently a peal of artillery told that the throne of the Moslem kings was lost for ever. ‘Allah Achbar, God is great!’ he exclaimed; and, unable to refrain his grief, he burst into a flood of tears. ‘Weep not,’ said his mother, the stern proud Azeshah, ‘weep not as a woman for the loss of a kingdom which you knew not how to defend as a man.’”