enough. I knew where went the ascending and descending
ways. Now almost all lay asleep, antique, shaded, Moorish,
still, under the stars. The soldiery and the hidalgos, their
officers, slept; only the sentinels waked before the citadel
entry and on the town walls and by the three gates. The
town folk slept, all but the sick and the sorrowful and the
careful and those who had work at dawn. Listen, and you
might hear sound like the first moving of birds, or breath
of dawn wind coming up at sea. The greater part now of
the town folk were Christian, brought in since the five-year-
gone siege that still resounded. Moors were here, but they
had turned Christian, or were slaves, or both slave and
Christian. I had seen monks of all habits and heard ring
above the inn the bells of a nunnery. Now again they
rang. The mosque was now a church. It rose at hand,--
white, square, domed. I went by a ladder-like lane down
toward Zarafa wall and the Gate of the Lion. At sunrise
in would pour peasants from the vale below, bringing vegetables
and poultry, and mountaineers with quails and conies,
and others with divers affairs. Outgoing would be those
who tilled a few steep gardens beyond the wall, messengers
and errand folk, soldiers and traders for the army before
Granada.

It was full early when I came to the wall. I could make
out the heavy and tall archway of the gate, but as yet was
no throng before it. I waited; the folk began to gather, the
sun came up. Zarafa grew rosy. Now was clatter enough,
voices of men and brutes, both sides the gate. The gate
opened. Juan Lepe won out with a knot of brawny folk