Bensaken went with us among these strange people, and as he understood their language, he made our visit among them exceedingly entertaining, and the facts that we gathered from him and them of their haunts and habits are perhaps as reliable as those which Borrow and others have furnished. I could not learn that they have any religious system. They believe in one God, but they have more to do with the devil, whether they believe in him or not. They have no faith in anybody. Why should they, or rather how could they? Intending to keep faith with nobody, and living only to deceive, they cannot be expected to believe. If they are not lineal descendants of Ishmael, they are like the Arabs, a nomadic race, and their hands are against every man, and every man’s against them. I fell to musing over the change that three or four hundred years had made in the state of things on this famous spot. For we are within the grounds of the Alhambra. And the time was when the splendor of Oriental courts was shining here in its brightest array, and the luxury of kings and queens was spread about these seats that are now the scene of this low revelry and mirth. The vanity of earth is impressed upon me by this miserable show. The fashion of this world passeth away. And, indeed, the lesson of the Alhambra is the strangest, saddest lesson that ruins teach. Its walls, its towers, its turrets, its gates, in their decay, as they yet linger on the heights overlooking the city and the plain, seem to say, We are witnesses to-day that the glory of kings is fleeting as the dew of the morning: “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples—” have dissolved; and the wreck behind is the monument of a departed race, an extinct dynasty, a better, wiser, nobler race by far than that which now inhabits the land. For when the Moors went out of Spain, they carried with them arts, science, enterprise, energy, strength, and taste. They left a people in possession ignorant, proud, bigoted, and indolent: a people that now, in the midst of an advancing age, is making no advance; a people who carry earth in baskets instead of wheelbarrows, and wood on donkeys instead of using carts!