I was
welcome to explore the apartment, and there was the key.
Thus provided, I returned forthwith to the door. It opened, as I had
surmised, to a range of vacant chambers; but they were quite different
from the rest of the palace. The architecture, though rich and
antiquated, was European. There was nothing Moorish about it. The
first two rooms were lofty; the ceilings, broken in many places,
were of cedar, deeply panelled and skilfully carved with fruits and
flowers, intermingled with grotesque masks or faces.
The walls had evidently in ancient times been hung with damask;
but now were naked, and scrawled over by that class of aspiring
travellers who defile noble monuments with their worthless names.
The windows, dismantled and open to wind and weather, looked out
into a charming little secluded garden, where an alabaster fountain
sparkled among roses and myrtles, and was surrounded by orange and
citron trees, some of which flung their branches into the chambers.
Beyond these rooms were two saloons, longer but less lofty, looking
also into the garden. In the compartments of the panelled ceilings
were baskets of fruit and garlands of flowers, painted by no mean
hand, and in tolerable preservation. The walls also had been painted
in fresco in the Italian style, but the paintings were nearly
obliterated; the windows were in the same shattered state with those
of the other chambers.
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