The Sierra Neváda with its striking skylines, crisp and clean-cut against an azure background, is yearly surveyed by thousands of tourists in southern Spain. The majority content themselves with the distant view from the battlements of Alhambra or from the summer-palace of Generalife. Few penetrate the alpine solitude or scale peaks that look so near yet cost some toil to gain. We are not ashamed to admit that these glorious sierras have in themselves possessed for us attractions that transcend in interest the accumulated art-treasures, the store of historic and legendary lore that illumine the shattered relics of Moslem rule--of an Empire City where during seven centuries the power and faith of the Crescent dominated south-western Europe and the focal point of mediaeval culture and chivalry. None, nevertheless, can long sojourn in Granada wholly uninfluenced by its stirring past, by the pathetic story of the fall of Moorish dominion, and the words graven on countless stones till they seem to represent the very spirit of this land, the words of the founder, King Alhama: LA GALIB ILLA ALLAH = Only God is Victor. Abler pens have portrayed these things, and we will only pause to touch on one dramatic episode--since its scene lies on our course to the "high tops"--when Boabdil, last of the Caliphs, paused in his flight across the _vega_ to cast back a final glance at the scene of his former greatness and lost empire. "You do well," snarled Axia, his mother, "to weep over your kingdom like a woman since you could not defend it like a man." That the maternal reproach was undeserved was proved by Boabdil's heroic death in battle, thirty years later, near Fez.[54] From this spot--still poetically called El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro--the Sierra Neváda stretches away some forty miles to the eastward with an average depth of ten miles, and includes within that area the four loftiest altitudes in all this mountain-spangled Peninsula of Spain. The chief points in the Pyrenees, nevertheless, run them fairly close, as shown in the following table:-- GREATEST ALTITUDES IN FEET _Sierra Neváda._ Mulahacen 11,781 Picacho de la Veleta 11,597 Alcazába 11,356 Cerro de los Machos 11,205 Col de la Veleta 10,826 _Pyrenees._ Pico de Nethou 11,168 Monte de Posets 11,046 Monte Perdido 10,994 By way of comparison it may be added that the next greatest elevations in Spain are:-- Picos de Europa (described in Chap. XXVIII.) 10,046 feet Sierra de Grédos (already described) 8,700 " Curiously all the loftiest elevations occur outside the great central table-lands of Spain, the highest point of which latter is the last-quoted Sierra de Grédos.