The doors are of white wood, with similar mouldings and ornaments on either side; the decorations were originally in colour, traces of which may still be discovered. The folding doors are hung on pivots, which are let into the socket of a marble slab below, and above into the soffit of a beam which crosses the colonnade of the Court of the Lions. This method of hanging the doors is precisely similar to that adopted in ancient temples, and is still practised throughout the East. The manner in which the bolt secures, at the same time, both flaps of the larger doors and the wicket, is full of ingenuity. Don Rafaél Contreras caused these doors, or what remained of them, to be replaced in the position for which they were originally intended. He found the fragments amid the lumber of the palace! His own words are: “Nous l’avons restaurée en 1856, l’ayant trouvé _brisée en quatre morceaux, abandonnée dans les magasins du palais_”--They were found, broken into four pieces, in the lumber rooms of the palace. PATIO DE LA ALBERCA--THE COURT OF THE FISH-POND. This Court was called in former times _Patio de los Arrayanes_--the Court of the Myrtles--by reason of its beautiful flowering shrubs which gem either side of the Fishpond; trim myrtle hedges, and orange trees rising beside the water. To enter the Court of the Fish-pond is to be straightway translated to the palace of Haroun-al-raschid: Granada changes to Damascus. The Moorish arches, springing from slender palm-tree shafts, are of bewildering beauty; the walls, no longer forbidding blocks of stone, but pierced trellises, that turn sunlight and moonlight into patterns resembling so much Venetian filigree. “Surely they are needle-work turned to stone,” says a traveller of long ago; “or some great Sultán has built them with panels cut from caskets of Indian ivory, though the piecing be not seen. The myrtles grow green and glossy round the great marble tank, 150 feet long, which flows with mellow water, in which burnished fish--some apparently red-hot, others of molten silver--steer, flirt, skim, and splash. Never stop to think that the dry, whity-brown, tubular-tiled, sloping roofs [Illustration: NORTH SIDE OF THE COURT OF THE FISH-POND.] [Illustration: ELEVATION OF AN ALCOVE IN THE COURT OF THE FISH-POND.] [Illustration: ELEVATION OF THE ARCADE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE COURT OF THE FISH-POND.] [Illustration: SECTION THROUGH PART OF THE COURT OF THE FISH-POND] [Illustration: AND THE HALL OF THE AMBASSADORS.] [Illustration: THE BATHS, HALL OF REPOSE.] EXPLANATION OF THE LETTERS OF REFERENCE IN THIS PLATE. A A A. Entrances to the quarter of the Palace containing the baths. B B B B B B. Passages communicating with the different apartments and baths. C C. Apartments, looking into. D D. A Court with a fountain in its centre. E E Baths and dressing-rooms. F F F. Warm baths.