ff his cap and arranged so complete a
disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my
innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us.
But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed
to him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was
incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic
Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at
Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most
beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the
guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I
personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery
wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me
still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals
the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste,
but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their
presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live
near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its
recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes
of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's being, and I will
not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is
that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the
fagade of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian
captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in
their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most
sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of
warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for
being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the
church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that
reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man's inhumanity to man!
How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had
eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very
decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.

Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would
not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings
used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but
which the common American must now see by going outside the church.