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198 DAYS IN THE SUN
bra rise before me mighty in their mass as the walls
of Babylon.
I walk around the projecting bit of wall—Charles
V here glued a pasticceria fountain against the stout
masonry—and I turn in under the horseshoe vault
to enter a pompous four-cornered tower, the Tower of
Justice. To this tower the King would descend twice
a week from his castle to adjust the litigations of the
Granadinos—like the kings of the Orient in the Bible.
And here, over the vault, is a counterfeit of the hand
mentioned in Deuteronomy (vI, 8), the symbol given
to the Jews by Moses that they might be mindful of
the doctrine: ‘God is one only!’ On the capitals that
support the vault the same tenet is repeated in Arabic
characters: ‘“There is one God, Allah, and Mohammed
is his Prophet!” How modest old Moses was com-
pared with his Mohammedan rival!
The Oid Testament and the Koran! Moses and
Mohammed! And up on the battlements, high above
everything else, stood two freckle-faced American
gentlemen discussing quotations of shares in the Rio
Tinto copper-mines!
The hill of the Alhambra opened at this elevation
on to a perfect plateau, framed on all sides by massive
walls with solid turrets. Down in the bowels of the
mountain lay the vaulted cistern fed by miles and miles
of canals from the glaciers of Sierra Nevada. A deep
shaft led down to the water, which is as cold as ice
even in the hottest summer.
Even at this height water was gurgling in every
hole, singing and trickling forth from little pipes, and
dancing gayly in the air, rising and falling like a
juggler’s balls. And way down in the Vega I could
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