There will never be produced a new Alhambra, any more than a new Parthenon or new Pyramids; for these great buildings were the expressions of ideas and aspirations peculiar to societies which have long ago perished. Thus, the Red Palace of Granada is not interesting merely as a Mohammedan edifice left isolated in the far west of Europe, but as the monument of a people and a civilisation long dead and gone. A sadness, too, attaches to it, proceeding from the memory of the violent extinction of that people with a mission unfulfilled--fraught, as it seems to have been, with so much of light and beauty to the Christian and the Muslim worlds. The Sierra Nevada thrusts forward a spur which overlooks Granada on the south-east, and is divided by two clefts or barrancos into three eminences. The easternmost of these is crowned by the Generalife, the westernmost by the ancient fortifications known as the Torres Bermejas or Vermilion Towers. The hill between the two--in shape aptly compared by Ford to a grand piano--is that on which the various buildings, collectively styled the Alhambra, are reared. Here there existed a settlement in remote Celtiberian days; and the later city of Illiberis or Elvira stood here, and perhaps extended to the Torres Bermejas. When the Moors came they erected a fortress--the Alcazaba--on the point of the Alhambra hill, overlooking the Vermilion Towers. To this they gave the name of _Alhamra_, “the red,” as Riaño thinks, to distinguish it from the Alcazaba in the Albaicin quarter, or perhaps from some confusion of the new building with the old. The builder, according to Al Khattíb, was one Sawar Alcaysi, who lived in the second half of the ninth century; though Contreras says it was known as the Tower of Ibn Jaffir, and Ford names Habus Ibn Makesen as the founder. At all events, the structure dated from the earliest period of the Arabic domination, and Al Ahmar found here, on taking possession of Granada, a small town girdled with walls and defended by a citadel.