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Shortly afterward horsemen came galloping up the hill that leads to the main gate of the Alhambra, spreading the alarm that Boabdil had entered the city and possessed himself of the Alcazaba. In the first transports of his rage the old king would have struck the messenger to earth.
The dancing, which, under various pretences, Lady Clonbrony had delayed till Lord Colambre was at liberty, began immediately after Miss Broadhurst's departure; and the chalked mosaic pavement of the Alhambra was, in a few minutes, effaced by the dancers' feet. How transient are all human joys, especially those of vanity!
The sun had barely risen when three signal-guns boomed from the heights of the Alhambra, and the Christian army began its march across the vega. To spare the feelings of the citizens it was decided that the city should not be entered by its usual gates, and a special road had been opened leading to the Alhambra.
Boabdil was informed by his spies of the intention of the Christian king, and prepared to make a desperate defence. Hernando de Baeza, a Christian who resided with the royal family in the Alhambra as interpreter, gives in a manuscript memoir an account of the parting of Boabdil from his family as he went forth to battle.
It was a large structure in the Moorish style, built by the celebrated Spanish artist, Juan Santigosa, who had been obliged to sell all five years before house, studio, horses, completed paintings, sketches begun in order to pay immense losses at gaming. Florent Chapron had at the time bought the sort of counterfeit Alhambra, a portion of which he rented to his brother-in-law.
Don Juan, on reaching the palace, was well received by the old king, holding an interview with him which extended so far into the night that it was too late to return to camp, and he was lodged in a sumptuous apartment of the Alhambra. In the morning he was approached by one of the Moorish courtiers, a man given to jest and satire, who invited him to take part in a ceremony in the palace mosque.
He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him. The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa.
Thence by train to Granada to visit the marvellously lovely Alhambra, and of course to meet the King of the Gipsies; Ronda, romantic and picturesque; Cordova and its immense mosque and old Roman bridge; and so on to Madrid by a most comfortable and fast train; but the temperature all through Central Spain is extremely cold in winter.
I likewise remember Leotard the acrobat at the Alhambra, and sundry performances at the old Pantheon, where I heard such popular songs as "The Captain with the Whiskers" and "The Charming Young Widow I met in the Train." Nigger ditties were often the "rage" during my boyhood, and some of them, like "Dixie-land" and "So Early in the Morning," still linger in my memory.
The old king, Muley Abul Hassan, had retired to his couch that night in one of the strongest towers of the Alhambra, but his restless anxiety kept him from repose. In the first watch of the night he heard a shout faintly rising from the quarter of the Albaycin, which is on the opposite side of the deep valley of the Darro.
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