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.
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 owners were dead,
men and women, or were mudexares, vassals,
or were fled, men and women, all who could flee, to
their kindred in Africa. Or they yet cowered,
men and women, in the broken garden, awaiting individual
disaster. The Kingdom of Granada had sins, and
the Kingdom of Castile, and the Kingdom of Leon.
The Moor was stained, and the Spaniard, the Moslem
and the Christian and the Jew. Who had stains
the least or the most God knew—and it was
a poor inquiry. Seek the virtues and bind them
with love, each in each!
If the mountain road had been largely solitary, it
was not so of this road. There were folk enough
in the wide Vega of Granada. Clearly, as though
the one party had been dressed in black and the other
in red, they divided into vanquished and victor.
Bit by bit, now through years, all these towns and
villages, all these fertile fields and bosky places,
rich and singing, had left the hand of the Moor for
the hand of the Spaniard.
In all this part of his old kingdom the Moor lay low
in defeat. In had swarmed the Christian and with
the Christian the Jew, though now the Jew must leave.
The city of Granada was not yet surrendered, and the
Queen and King held all soldiery that they might at
Santa Fe, built as it were in a night before Granada
walls. Yet there seemed at large bands enough,
licentious and loud, the scum of soldiery. Ere
I reached the village that I now saw before me I had
met two such bands, I wondered, and then wondered
at my own wonder.
