State Library of NSW
[Page 44]
which stretched beyond, all opening into the same space. [indecipherable] we managed at the expense of a few pesetas, to get up a village dance & sometimes we had to return into our rooms & barricade our doors to save us from the good humoured curiosity of these poor people who had seen very little of any strangers and nothing whatever of English people before. At these places we always found good bread, excellent water & very fair wine and generally a good supply of eggs. The beds too tho very rough were for the most part clean. We used to travel sometimes as late as 12 oclock at night, but thanks to the new Guardia Civle, a sort of wayside Gendarmerie we never met with the slightest annoyance, indeed we never heard of a robbing all the time we were in Spain. The numerous crosses all along the line of road more unusual in Valencia than in any other district of Spain show that a very different state of things obtained there not long ago. From Valencia we went to Alicante & from there by sea to Malaga, from Malaga where we stopped for some weeks we went to Granada, the most interesting & most picturesque City in the whole Kingdom. Here we spent a fortnight. I & my companion George Salting in the Alhambra, photographing, my wife [indecipherable] in her Hotel in the town, could it became so cold there we had to run off to milder regions. I made an excursion from Granada for 4 days into the Alpujarras Mountains, the last refuge of the Moors & where the people now are eating the descendants of Moors scarcely even now [indecipherable]. This was the country assigned to poor Boabdilas a solution when he handed over Granada to Ferdinand & Isabella. It is all, up to the very mountain tops under the vine sometimes planted in such steep places, that the grapes are gathered at [indecipherable] and bird eggs are gathered on [indecipherable] let down by ropes. From Granada we went to Cordova where I was a little disappointed in the celebrated Cathedral of 1000 columns, the effect of the vistas being altogether destroyed by the Coro or Centre Chapel, which rises in the midst. With the Alhambra by the by I was more than charmed, it quite surpassed my [indecipherable] expectations. I hope to send you some of the photographs of it. The representation in the Sydenham [?] Palace is very fair, but then it is only such a virtually small scale & of to small a portion of the whole that it gives a most inadequate idea of the exquisite reality. From Cordova we went to Serville where we stopped altogether 6 weeks.
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