the Generaliffe gleam
against the dark foliage. Beyond, across the whole southern sweep, rises
the chalky, hazy blue of the Sierra Nevada, capped with glittering,
everlasting snow. Gazing up from the valley below, one might fancy it a
white veil thrown back from the lovely features of the landscape.

Thus lies Granada, a verdant and perfumed valley wrapt in the soft
mystery of its hazy atmosphere,--"Grenade,--plus eclatante que la fleur
et plus savoureuse que le fruit, dont elle porte le nom, semble une
vierge paresseuse qui s'est couchee au soleil depuis le jour de la
creation dans un lit de bruyeres et de mousse, defendue par une muraille
de cactus et d'aloes,--elle s'endort gaiement aux chansons des oiseaux
et le matin s'eveille souriante au murmure de ses cascatelles."[19]

More than any other spot on earth, Granada seems haunted by memories of
bygone glory. The wide plains, now inhabited by less than seventy-five
thousand, once swarmed with over half a million souls. The artist feels
poignantly the charm of those long centuries of Arabian Days and Nights
that were forever blotted out by the zeal of the Christian sword. The
ruined temples still attest the thrift and industry, the refinement and
learning of the vanished race; the squalid poverty that has replaced it
is deaf and blind to the records of ancient grandeur, but the traveler
and the historian may still be thrilled by the struggle that destroyed
"the most voluptuous of all retirements" and feel there as nowhere else
the relentless power of the most Catholic Kings, the pathos of the Moor.

Granada is a very old city, and like Cordova and Seville, it was one of
the principal Moorish centres; in fact after their fall, the industries
and culture which had been theirs went to swell the inheritance of
Granada. Its name has always been associated with the scarlet-blossoming
tree which covers its slopes, whose fruit the Catholic sovereigns
proudly placed in the point of their shield, with stalks and leaves and
shell open-grained. During the Roman occupation, a settlement had been
made on the wooded slopes at the foot of the Sierra Nevada and called
Granatum (pomegranate). The Goths in their turn swept over the peninsula
until, in 711, they were driven out of the valley by the advancing Arab
hordes. These transformed the name given it by the Romans to Karnattah.
Seven hundred and eighty-two years passed before the Crescent set
forever on the Iberian peninsula. Dyn