Taking a morning off, I walked out to the Cartuja Convent. The Gran Capitan, Gonzalo de Cordoba, at one time granted an estate to the Carthusians and on it they erected the convent to which I turned my steps. The Order about this time was immensely wealthy and they spent money with reckless lavishness on the interior of their church. Mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, ebony and cedar-wood entered largely into their decorations, as well as ivory and silver. But perhaps the marbles in the church are the most remarkable part of their scheme. These were chosen for the wonderful patterns of the sections, and with a little stretch of the imagination I could trace well-composed landscapes, human and animal forms in a great many of the slabs. The overdone chirrugueresque work, to which add these fantastic wall decorations, makes this interior positively scream. It is nothing more nor less than a vulgar display of wealth. The cloisters of the convent also attest the bad taste of the Carthusians, they contain a series of pictures which represent the most repugnant and bloodthirsty scenes of persecutions and martyrdoms of the Order. In another convent, San Gerónimo, was buried the Gran Capitan. A slab marks the spot, but his poor bones were exhumed and carried off to Madrid in 1868 to form the nucleus of a Spanish Pantheon. Needless to say, like so many other great ideas in Spain, nothing further was done, and Gonzalo's remains still await a last resting-place. One more fact before I reach the Alhambra. In the church of San Juan de Dios you may see the cage in which the founder, Juan de Robles, was shut up as a lunatic. What do you think his lunacy was? Having the infirm and the poor always before him, this tender-hearted man went about preaching the necessity of hospitals to alleviate their distress. Aye, he was a hundred years and more before his time, so they shut him up in a cage and there let him rot and die. Those that came after in more enlightened days valued the good man's crusade at its proper price, and he was eventually canonised, and his supposed remains now rest in an _urna_. Up a toilsome approach, splashing through the mud, I drove on the night I reached Granada. As the horses slowed up, I put my head out of the carriage window, we were passing under an archway and I knew that at last one of the dreams of my life was realised. I was in the Alhambra. I became conscious of rows and rows of tall trees swaying in the wind. I smelt the delicious scent of damp earth, and could just distinguish, as the carriage crawled up the steep ascent, in the lulls of the storm, the sound of running water. It was fairyland, it was peace. After that long, tedious journey and the glare of the electric lit streets I had just passed through, I sank back on the cushions and felt my reward had come. [Illustration: GRANADA. THE ALHAMBRA]