through streets to market square and up
to citadel and pausing at varying levels for breath and the prospect, I
had learned this town well enough. I knew where went the ascending and
descending ways. Now almost all lay asleep, antique, shaded, Moorish,
still, under the stars. The soldiery and the hidalgos, their officers,
slept; only the sentinels waked before the citadel entry and on the town
walls and by the three gates. The town folk slept, all but the sick and
the sorrowful and the careful and those who had work at dawn. Listen,
and you might hear sound like the first moving of birds, or breath of
dawn wind coming up at sea. The greater part now of the town folk
were Christian, brought in since the five-year-gone siege that still
resounded. Moors were here, but they had turned Christian, or were
slaves, or both slave and Christian. I had seen monks of all habits and
heard ring above the inn the bells of a nunnery. Now again they rang.
The mosque was now a church. It rose at hand,--white, square, domed. I
went by a ladder-like lane down toward Zarafa wall and the Gate of the
Lion. At sunrise in would pour peasants from the vale below, bringing
vegetables and poultry, and mountaineers with quails and conies, and
others with divers affairs. Outgoing would be those who tilled a few
steep gardens beyond the wall, messengers and errand folk, soldiers and
traders for the army before Granada.

It was full early when I came to the wall. I could make out the heavy
and tall archway of the gate, but as yet was no throng before it. I
waited; the folk began to gather, the sun came up. Zarafa grew rosy. Now
was clatter enough, voices of men and brutes, both sides the gate. The
gate opened. Juan Lepe won out with a knot of brawny folk going to the
mountain pastures. Well forth, he looked back and saw Zarafa gleaming
rose and pearl in the blink of the sun, and sent young merchantward a
wish for good. Then he took the eastward way down the mountain, toward
lower mountains and at last the Vega of Granada.

CHAPTER III

THE day passed. I had adventures of the road, but none of consequence.
I slept well among the rocks, waked, ate the bit of bread I had with me,
and fell again to walking.

Mountains were now withdrawing to the distant horizon where they stood
around, a mighty and beautiful wall. I was coming down into the plain of
Granada, that once had been a garden. Now, north, south, east, west,
it lay war-trampled. Old owner