From Time To Time I
Meditated A Severe Rebuke, But In The End I Made Him None, And I Am
Now
convinced that this was wise, for he probably would not have minded it,
and as it was, when I
Addressed him some commonplace as to the probable
time of our arrival he answered in the same spirit, and then presently
grew very courteously communicative. He told me for one thing, after we
had passed the mountain gates of the famous Vega and were making our way
under the moonlight over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood of
battles long ago, that the tall chimneys we began to see blackening the
air with their volumed fumes were the chimneys of fourteen beet-root
sugar factories belonging to the Duke of Wellington. Then I divined, as
afterward I learned, that the lands devoted to this industry were part
of the rich gift which Spain bestowed upon the Great Duke in gratitude
for his services against the Napoleonic invasion. His present heir has
imagined a benevolent use of his heritage by inviting the peasantry of
the Vega to the culture of the sugar-beet; but whether the enterprise
was prospering I could not say; and I do not suppose any reader of mine
will care so much for it as I did in the pour of the moonlight over the
roofs and towers that were 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.
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