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202 DAYS IN THE SUN
to the sky, each one richer than its predecessor, until
one day there stood the Alhambra, more radiant than
all the others, more lovely than any other structure
erected by the Moors in Spain. Generalife, the sum-
mer palace, put up at about the same time, surmounts
another hill, even higher than the Alhambra, but the
horizontal distance between them is so short that you
can throw stones on Alhambra’s turrets from Gen-
eralife. When there were palace revolutions in Al-
hambra, the kings sought asylum higher up; and here
they spent their honeymoons each time they took a new
wife.
You may walk about for a long time within the
strong walls of Alhambra without coming upon the
palace. There is an entire city here reaching in every
direction, with wine-rooms, churches, slums, photog-
raphers and bunco-steerers. Suddenly you stand at the
edge of a sharp declivity, from which a path leads
downward into something that looks like a collection
of cabinets with roofs of glass. This is the palace
viewed from above. A rickety door is opened and you
find yourself in a long gloomy courtyard in which the
custodians sit over braziers, nodding. One of them
opens a door and—
Who will describe these magic apartments with their
vaulting, their columns and their basins? The won-
derful stucco, the symbols, the delicate lines and tense
forms, the great green surfaces of water disturbed by
the leap of gold-fish and framed by tablets of marble,
hedges of metal, luxurious orange-trees!_ Here you
have all the forms that describe life and well-being and
the symbols of Islam; all the colors that are elevating
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