It was midnight in the streets of Granada--midnight, but not repose. The multitude, roused into one of their paroyxsms of wrath and sorrow, by the reflection that the morrow was indeed the day of their subjection to the Christian foe, poured forth through the streets to the number of twenty thousand. It was a wild and stormy night; those formidable gusts of wind, which sometimes sweep in sudden winter from the snows of the Sierra Nevada, howled through the tossing groves, and along the winding streets. But the tempest seemed to heighten, as if by the sympathy of the elements, the popular storm and whirlwind. Brandishing arms and torches, and gaunt with hunger, the dark forms of the frantic Moors seemed like ghouls or spectres, rather than mortal men; as, apparently without an object, save that of venting their own disquietude, or exciting the fears of earth, they swept through the desolate city. In the broad space of the Vivarrambla the crowd halted, irresolute in all else, but resolved at least that something for Granada should yet be done. They were for the most armed in their Moorish fashion; but they were wholly without leaders: not a noble, a magistrate, an officer, would have dreamed of the hopeless enterprise of violating the truce with Ferdinand. It was a mere popular tumult--the madness of a mob;--but not the less formidable, for it was an Eastern mob, and a mob with sword and shaft, with buckler and mail--the mob by which oriental empires have been built and overthrown! There, in the splendid space that had witnessed the games and tournaments of that Arab and African chivalry--there, where for many a lustrum kings had reviewed devoted and conquering armies--assembled those desperate men; the loud winds agitating their tossing torches that struggled against the moonless night. “Let us storm the Alhambra!” cried one of the band: “let us seize Boabdil, and place him in the midst of us; let us rush against the Christians, buried in their proud repose!” “Lelilies, Lelilies!--the Keys and the Crescent!” shouted the mob. The shout died: and at the verge of the space was suddenly heard a once familiar and ever-thrilling voice. The Moors who heard it turned round in amaze and awe; and beheld, raised upon the stone upon which the criers or heralds had been wont to utter the royal proclamations, the form of Almamen, the santon, whom they had deemed already with the dead. “Moors and people of Granada!” he said, in a solemn but hollow voice, “I am with ye still. Your monarch and your heroes have deserted ye, but I am with ye to the last! Go not to the Alhambra: the fort is impenetrable--the guard faithful. Night will be wasted, and day bring upon you the Christian army. March to the gates; pour along the Vega; descend at once upon the foe!” He spoke, and drew forth his sabre; it gleamed in the torchlight--the Moors bowed their heads in fanatic reverence--the santon sprang from the stone, and passed into the centre of the crowd.