It Dwells Upon The Rich Look Of The Land And The Comfort Of
The Farms Contrasting With The Wild Irregularity
Of the mountain ranges
which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no doubt that if I
had
Then read that most charming of all Washington Irving's Spanish
studies, the story, namely, of his journey over quite the same way we
had come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in lively
comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, I
find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain coloring which it
professes to have found green, brown, red, gray, and blue, but whether
all at once or not it does not say. It is more definite as to the plain
we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages,
cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings,
so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of
wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through. It
did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of
peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but
their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their
frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the lamps began to
twinkle from their windows. At a certain station, I am reminded by my
careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sunset
pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began to grow cooler, and the
dying day to empurple the uplands everywhere, without abating the charm
of the blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very homelike
scene, and where there was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness
was relieved by the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs
to browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner
and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and blew lullingly
in at our window. We made such long stops that the lights began to fade
out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a
station which we were so long in coming to that we thought it must be
next to Granada, a Spanish gentleman got in with us; and though the
prohibitory notice of _No Fumadores_ stared him in the face, it did not
stare him out of countenance; for he continued to smoke like a
locomotive the whole way to our journey's end. 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. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say
now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine
moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges
honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the
wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it
dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it
had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang
of pure ecstasy.
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