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A MORNING’S JOURNEY 199
see a far-ramified network of channeled veins that
once made this great plain into a garden of Paradise
sung by all the singers of the Moors.
This mountain of the Alhambra, which affords a
matchless view, is surrounded by a halo of legends
rich and varied. Every turret is woven about with
tales of magicians and warriors, wondrously beautiful
women and imprisoned sons of monarchs. Here love
blazed forth in deeds of blood, a bloody deed for every
poppy which now burns on the steep walls of the moun-
tain; and hatred ate its way through every crevice of
Alhambra.
The Orient sowed the seeds of its culture to this
far-western limit; intrigues of the harem, revolutions
of the palace, mass murders, hatred as venomous as
verdigris, all-consuming love. The Zegri and the
Abencerrages murdered one another openly or in
secret. Each dynasty was eager for the blood of the
other; and on one day we encounter in the tales a
youth from one of the two families concerned in the
feud, and a young girl from the other. Their hearts
found each other in spite of the barriers of hatred and
blood-revenge, and they met by night in one of the
little gardens full of flowers which still hang perched
in spots between the walls, like swallows’ nests over
the abyss. Their young love bore both white flowers
and red berries. One night he found her murdered in
the garden, lifted her radiant body in his hands
lamenting, and attached it to the sky as a new con-
stellation.
Zelinda and Zorayda, Adalifa and Lindaraja still
dot the nocturnal sky in this zone as radiant bodies, so
powerful has been the effect of Moorish romance.
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