On entering, the Hall of Justice, the roof of which is a monument of art of the most inestimable rarity and worth, immediately attracts your attention, as it forms the back of the parallelogram. There you see the only Arabian pictures, perhaps, which have come down to us. One of them represents the Court of Lions itself, with the fountain, which is very apparent, but gilt: some personages, whom the oldness of the painting does not allow you to distinguish clearly, seem to be engaged in a joust or passage of arms. The subject of the other appears to be a sort of divan where the Moorish kings of Granada are assembled, and whose white burnous, olive-coloured faces, red mouths, and mysteriously dark eyes, are still easily discernible. These paintings, as is asserted, are executed on prepared leather, pasted on cedar panels, and serve to prove that the precept of the Koran which forbids the likenesses of animated beings being taken was not always scrupulously observed by the Moors, even if the twelve lions of the fountain were not there to confirm this assertion. To the left, halfway up the gallery, is the Hall of the Two Sisters, which is the fellow to the Hall of the Abencerrages. This name of _las Dos Hermanas_ is given it from two immense flagstones of white Macael marble, equal in size and perfectly alike, which form part of the pavement. The vaulted roof, or cupola, which the Spaniards expressively call _media naranja_ (half an orange), is a miracle of work and patience. It is like a honeycomb, or the stalactites of a grotto, or the bunches of soap-bubbles which children blow out through a straw. The myriads of little vaults, of domes three or four feet high which grow out of one another, crossing and intersecting each other's edges, seem rather the effect of fortuitous crystallization than the work of a human hand; the blue, red, and green in the hollows of the mouldings are still nearly as bright as if they had only just been put on. The walls, like those of the Hall of Ambassadors, are covered, from the frieze to the height of a man, with stucco-work of the most complicated and delicate description. The bottom of the walls is coated with those square pieces of glazed clay of which the black, yellow, and green angles, combined with the white ground, form a mosaic-work. The middle of the apartment, according to the invariable custom of the Arabs, whose habitations seem to be nothing but large ornamented fountains, is occupied by a basin and a jet of water. There are four fountains under the Gate of Justice, a like number under the entrance-gate, and another in the Hall of the Abencerrages, without counting the _Taza de los Leones_, which, not satisfied with vomiting water through the mouths of its twelve monsters, throws up another torrent towards the sky out of the cap which surmounts it. All this water flows through small trenches made in the flooring of the halls and the pavement of the courts,