[Illustration: MOSAIC IN DADO OF RECESS, HALL OF THE TWO SISTERS.]
[Illustration: MOSAIC IN DADO, HALL OF THE TWO SISTERS.]
arrest the air. Everything must float and sway; they would not bar out the chirp of the dripping silver water. They thinned and shaved the pillars till they were no longer cylinders of marble, but tender saplings, or flower-stalks, slender as spear-shafts. The spandrils are not corbelled beams, faced with gargoyle monsters, but perforated supports as to some fairy’s cabinet. There is nothing to hold up, only ivory-patterned walls, and a honeycombed dome that seems to float in mid-air.
Here it is said that thirty-six cavaliers of the heroic line of Abencerrage were sacrificed to appease the jealousy or allay the fears of a tyrant. The fountain ran red with the noblest blood of Granada; and a deep stain on the marble pavement is pointed out by the _cicerone_ of the pile as a sanguinary record of the massacre. The discolourations must be regarded with the same perfect faith with which one looks upon the traditional stains of Rizzio’s blood on the floor of the chamber of the unhappy Queen Mary at Holyrood. Who desires to be sceptical on such points of popular belief? The enlightenment of the happy reader of De Foe’s immortal romance--happy in the masterly illusion of the author--robbed him of one of the chief delights of his life. If there is any country in Europe where it is easy to live in the romantic and fabulous traditions of the past, it is in legendary, proud-spirited, romantic Spain, where the old, magnificent, barbaric spirit even now contends with modern innovation.
In the silent halls of the Alhambra, surrounded with the insignia of regal sway, and vivid with traces of Oriental voluptuousness, everything speaks and breathes of the glorious days of Granada when under the dominion of the Crescent. In the proudest days of Moslem domination, the Abencerrages were the soul of everything noble and chivalrous. The veterans of the family, who sat in the royal Council, were the foremost to devise those heroic enterprises which carried dismay into the territories of the Christian; and what the sages of the family devised, the young men of the name were prompt to execute. In all services of hazard, in all adventurous forays, the Abencerrages were sure to win the brightest laurels. In those noble recreations, too, which bear so close an affinity to war, still the Abencerrages carried off the palm. None could equal them in splendour of array, in gallantry of device, or in their noble bearing and glorious horsemanship. Their open-handed munificence made them the idols of the populace, while their lofty magnanimity and perfect faith gained them golden opinions from the generous and high-minded; the “word of an Abencerrage” was a guarantee that never admitted doubt.