It was about four o'clock when we arrived at Baylen, famous for the disastrous capitulation which is known by this name. We were to pass the night there, and while waiting for supper we went to take a stroll through the town and about the environs with the lady from Granada, and a very pretty young girl who was going with her father and mother to take sea-baths at Malaga; for the general reserve of the Spaniards quickly gives way to polite and cordial familiarity, as soon as they are certain that you are neither a commercial traveller, nor a tight-rope dancer, nor a hawker of pomatum. The church of Baylen, the construction of which does not date much further back than the sixteenth century, astonished me by its strange colour. Its stone and marble baked by the sun of Spain, instead of turning black as such things do in our damp climate, had assumed red hues of the most extraordinary vividness, and which even inclined to saffron and purple, resembling in their tints vine-leaves at the end of autumn. At the side of the church, a palm-tree, the first I had ever seen in the open air, rose above a little wall gilt by the reflection of the sun's burning rays, and abruptly spread out its branches in the dark azure of the heavens. This palm-tree--a sudden revelation from the East--thus met unexpectedly at the corner of a street, produced a singular effect on me. I expected, every instant, to see the profile of the camel's ostrich-like neck appear in the glimmering light thrown out by the setting sun, and the white bournous of the Arab float along the ranks of the caravan. Some rather picturesque ruins of ancient fortifications presented to our view a tower, in a sufficiently good state of preservation to allow us to ascend it by the aid of our hands and feet and the jutting out of the stones. We were rewarded for our trouble by one of the most magnificent sights it is possible to behold. The city of Baylen, with its tiled roofs, its red church, and its white houses huddled round the foot of the tower like a flock of goats, formed a charming foreground: further on were immense corn-fields, undulating like waves of gold, and right at the back, above several ranges of mountains, the ridge of the Sierra Nevada glittered in the distance like a chain of silver. Veins of snow, played on by the light, brightly sparkled and sent forth prismatic flashes; while the sun, similar to a large golden wheel, of which its disc was the nave, spread out its flaming rays, like spokes, in a sky tinged with all the hues of the agate and the advanturine.