The =Alhambra, Granada=, represents the best preserved as well as the most perfect example of the Moorish-Arabic genius. It was a fortress-palace, much of it built on the brink of the rock, the steep slopes of which were used to construct the lower stories of baths, offices, and guardrooms. The exterior has no impressiveness, though the original grouping of walls and roofs must have been highly picturesque. Its halls, chambers, and remains of a mosque are clustered about two rectangular courts or patios, which are joined like the two parts of an “L”--the “Court of the Alberca” and the “Court of the Lions.” From one of the ends of the Alberca Court projects the “Hall of the Ambassadors”; from the other the “Hall of the Tribunal,” while the long sides of the Court of Lions open respectively into the “Hall of the Abencerrages” and the “Hall of the Two Sisters.” The “Court of the Lions” is so called from the fountain in its centre, an immense marble basin supported upon twelve lions, which form a remarkable exception to the Muhammedan rule against representing the image of any living thing. Both these Courts are arcaded, the columns, set singly or in pairs, or groups, exhibiting, as do all the columns in the Alhambra, distinctive features in their capitals, which are separated by a high necking from the shaft. It is, however, in the interior of the halls that the decoration reaches its finest pitch and nowhere more than in the “Hall of the Two Sisters,” which formed the culminating feature of the harem quarters. The name is supposed to have been derived from two slabs of marble in the pavement but may well have been suggested by the window, which occupies a bay and is divided by a small column and two arches into two lights. The walls, above a high wainscot of lustred tiles, are encrusted with flat moulded arabesques, representing a delicate lacelike tracery of leafy vines and tendrils, still tinctured with the red, blue, and gold that formerly enriched them. The arabesques melt into the stalactite embellishments which completely cover the hollow of the dome; created, as it seems, by giant bees, whose cells hang down like grape-clusters in an endless profusion of exquisite intricacy. Time was when this unsurpassable delicacy of magnificence glowed with gold touched into a thousandfold diversity of tones, by the light of hanging lamps.