SHIELD OF A KING OF GRANADA 219 THE COURT OF THE LIONS IN THE ALHAMBRA 223 GARDEN OF THE GENERALIFE, GRANADA 229 A WINDOW IN THE ALHAMBRA 243 MOSQUE LAMP FROM GRANADA 249 MALAGA 255 SWORD OF BOABDIL (_Villaseca Collection, Madrid_) 261 [Illustration] THE STORY OF THE MOORS IN SPAIN. I. THE LAST OF THE GOTHS. When the armies of Alexander the Great were trampling upon the ancient empires of the East, one country remained undisturbed and undismayed. The people of Arabia sent no humble embassies to the conqueror. Alexander resolved to bring the contemptuous Arabs to his feet: he was preparing to invade their land when death laid its hand upon him, and the Arabs remained unconquered. This was more than three hundred years before Christ, and even then the Arabs had long been established in independence in their great desert peninsula. For nearly a thousand years more they continued to dwell there in a strange solitude. Great empires sprang up all around them; the successors of Alexander founded the Syrian kingdom of the Seleucids and the Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies; Augustus was crowned Imperator at Rome; Constantine became the first Christian emperor at Byzantium; the hordes of the barbarians bore down upon the wide-reaching provinces of the Cæsars--and still the Arabs remained undisturbed, unexplored, and unsubdued. Their frontier cities might pay homage to Chosroes or Cæsar, the legions of Rome might once and again flash across their highland wastes; but such impress was faint and transitory, and left the Arabs unmoved. Hemmed in as they were by lands ruled by historic dynasties, their deserts and their valour ever kept out the invader, and from the days of remote antiquity to the seventh century of the Christian era hardly anything was known of this secluded people save that they existed, and that no one attacked them with impunity.