GRANADA.

Nearly eight hundred years had passed away after the landing of Tarik, the
Arab, in Spain and the defeat and death of Don Roderic, the last king of
the Goths. During those centuries the handful of warriors which in the
mountains of the north had made a final stand against the invading hordes
had grown and spread, pushing back the Arabs and Moors, until now the
Christians held again nearly all the land, the sole remnant of Moslem
dominion being the kingdom of Granada in the south. The map of Spain shows
the present province of Granada as a narrow district bordering on the
Mediterranean Sea, but the Moorish kingdom covered a wider space,
spreading over the present provinces of Malaga and Almeria, and occupying
one of the richest sections of Spain. It was a rock-bound region. In every
direction ran sierras, or rugged mountain-chains, so rocky and steep as to
make the kingdom almost impregnable. Yet within their sterile confines lay
numbers of deep and rich valleys, prodigal in their fertility.

In the centre of the kingdom arose its famous capital, the populous and
beautiful city of Granada, standing in the midst of a great vega or plain,
one hundred miles and more in circumference and encompassed by the snowy
mountains of the Sierra Nevada. The seventy thousand houses of the city
spread over two lofty hills and occupied the valley between them, through
which ran the waters of the Douro. On one of these hills stood the
Alcazaba, a strong fortress; on the other rose the famous Alhambra, a
royal palace and castle, with space within its confines for forty thousand
men, and so rare and charming in its halls and courts, its gardens and
fountains, that it remains to-day a place of pilgrimage to the world for
lovers of the beautiful in architecture. And from these hills the city
between showed no less attractive, with its groves of citron, orange, and
pomegranate trees, its leaping fountains, its airy minarets, its mingled
aspect of crowded dwellings and verdant gardens.

High walls, three leagues in circuit, with twelve gates and a thousand and
thirty towers, girded it round, beyond which extended the vega, a vast
garden of delight, to be compared only with the famous plain of Damascus.
Through it the Xenil wound in silvery curves, its waters spread over the
plain in thousands of irrigating streams and rills. Blooming gardens and
fields of waving grain lent beauty to the plain; orchards and vineyards
clothed the sl