A shrine of white stone, which devotion turned into a precious reliquary with an annual anniversary of yearly pilgrimage,

on the crest of a green mountain that breathes the scent of orange blossom and holds Murcia at its feet, gleams white like a dove nested in a cypress tree.

That mountain is a treasure of faith and greenery since the days of the Moor; the Shrine overflows with gold and the mountain is a heap of gold.

The mountain is a hidden vault of poetic traditions: two races, two religions sowed them there in heaps beneath it with a bloody hand.

Seven centuries of fighting it cost to kindle, between the two, with the torch of that blaze, the beacon that today glitters above it with the Cross of God.

The Muslim flock fled beyond the sea; alone now the Christian Cross reigns in Murcia, and there today Murcia's faith makes its Spanish pilgrimage.

An original pilgrimage from that land of the sun, of faith and of joy: of a people such as only Spanish soil can bring forth.

A people typical and genuine of the Spain reclaimed from the men of Tétouan and Tunis, who still mix with the divine rite the war-cries of a skirmish.

An ardent people of huerta farmers, who, even with Moorish dress and customs, give the Christian rites Mohammedan flourishes of fireworks, zambras, and bulls.

The conqueror, settled in the home of the conquered, still lives upon his trail, clinging to what he won for himself in his reconquest.

He lives a Catholic and dies with Catholic funeral rites; but he sows, irrigates, and eats like a Moor, from whom he prefers customs, tools, and irrigation channels.

And he is not dishonored by this, nor does he get stuck in progress; he holds fast to his conquest, and keeps unscathed the character of his home and of his fertile plain.

A sober, healthy, strong people, though raised among flowers, who enjoy life while they live; they await death without fear and trust in God when they die.

Such are the land and its people, of characters so bold, that in it, men and women alike, the men are like sparks of fire, and the women like stars.

This is the people to whom I owe such pleasant final hours, that there I still believed myself young; and still in my ears I carry their applause and their serenades.

In their extreme friendship toward me and their extreme courtesy there lies the good theme of a good book; but I could no longer craft such a poem of gratitude.

From my swift passage through so wondrous a land, my white-haired wit can now give the people of Murcia no more than this humble token of remembrance.

Let us return to that mountain and to the age of tradition, when, still in infidel hands, the rich Shrine of today did not yet gleam white upon it.

Let us leave for another day and for another poem, more realistic and more Christian, the joyful Murcian festival that goes up the mountain in pilgrimage;

and let us turn mind and eyes back to the age now immemorial of tales, dreams, and whims, which bores and vexes today's philosophizing.

And let me here insert, though it be none of my business, what I am about to say as an illogical poet who rambles as he reasons:

and it is this: that Spain, whom today's dark future does not trouble, who submits poorly to the law, whose life's whole aim is to idle, sing, and quarrel,

may well throw her faith and poetry down into the gutter; but let me have my laugh at your philosophy preached to such a people.

Here, in our good Spain, where the siesta is slept, where the caña is sung, where work is a bother and life is one long holiday,

whoever seems to meditate, reflect, or philosophize… is dreaming, off in the clouds, or dozing; for this is not a country of the stripe of the Greek Stagirite's.

Under this midday sun one philosophizes so poorly that Spain today has, in a guitar-maker's shop, her philosopher's stone.

And leaving this too for a better occasion and a place where it fits well, let us return to the course and text of my broken narrative.

Let us go, then, to that mountain to see if we finally come upon the tradition that, in it and in Murcia's garden, the infidel Moor left behind.

Symphony, introduction, or preparatory scene for the Arab tradition — here arises the need to give a bit of history.

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Perhaps but hours after the hour in which askance it saw its glory turn to its own ill-starred fate — the Damascene Cordoban Caliphate,

Murcia saw invading her, coming by way of Almería, a horde of Moors, which, like water and like grass, kept gathering and growing.

Of that Arab flood we have never known the date and history with precision: poetry and tradition keep only a murky memory of it.

But Murcia was always a land well looked upon by God, and the seed of good it holds has carried her, in peace and war, ever in pursuit of her own good.

There is talk of a fortunate Emir, one Abú-Bekhr-al-Kaisí, who may be the perhaps legendary and famous Aarum-ar-Raschil of the legends of that land:

and this Emir must, no doubt, have been born under a lucky star; for so harsh a catastrophe came only to his aid, and he alone profited by it.

The Umayyad dynasty of Córdoba fell into the arms of another, fiercer race, and all Andalusia rushed to steal away its pieces.

Abú-al-Kaisí, with shrewd skill, with tenacious firmness, and with timely daring, knew how to bind fortune to the head of his host:

and he managed his affairs so well that from all Andalusia taifas, tribes, hosts, and peoples were drawn to his court, his cities, and into his pay.

The Moorish king of Granada, finding it too paltry, scorned his Emirate and left it in his hands; and over Murcia, while he reigned, no Christian came.

With shrewd diplomacy and stubborn perseverance, out of his fertile territory he made, little by little, a small emporium of the blessings of peace,

Soon there flocked to those lands, seeking out the Emir, all the good farmers and Hagarene traders who longed to live in peace;

and, enlisting the idle, the turncoat, and the rebellious under his frontier banner, he made use of his turbulent faction and thereby rid himself of it.

Murcia became peopled with honest and intelligent folk, useful, hardworking, and good; and a dawn of serene peace broke over a new horizon:

As holy bulwarks of peace, there arose on every side mills, agriculture, commerce, schools… the ease of trade and of the arts.

At the foot of the fortress the mosque was raised; and tireless labor brought wealth to Murcia, along with peace blessed by God.

Bleeding or damming the Gualentín and the Segura, al-Kaisí poured out over the plain torrents of their pure water through orchards, meadows, and pastures.

The mountains, today so bare and so stripped of trees, were then leafy forests, whose thickets gave shelter and pasture to game and to herds;

and this Emir, a genius for good, Murcia's shelter and support, managed at last to turn Murcia first into a garden and finally into an Eden.

And that mountain, in pursuit of which we go, through these very pages, seeking that oriental traditional tale which the Arab left within it,

was then a bouquet of trees, grasses, and flowers, which breathed out, like incense from a fairy's chamber, a million scents upon the breeze;

which even today the breezes draw in and scatter over Murcia, spilling them through her orchard-lands as they circle above Murcia and pour them out upon her.

That mountain had, and still has, a cleft, a seam of the most fertile ground, subject to none of the chances that befall the rest of the world:

it is a broad ravine, a copy of the lost Eden; sheltered from the winds, guarded from the frost, and a nest for golden orioles.

There grow, side by side and by the thousand, flowers and fruits unlike one another, springing up untended: alongside the softest geraniums the roughest, hairiest loquats:

whose pollen and seeds are carried there in their beaks by the wandering little birds, by the insect on its tiny wings, and by the air on its fanning currents.

And that fertile ravine, which is Murcia's gateway, whose orchard-land is its carpet, and to which the mountain gives the shade of its leafy canopy,

is a little basket of roses, a source of restoring and life-giving vapors, a beacon-light for butterflies and a nesting-ground for nightingales;

where neither evil nor grief has ever found entrance; where nothing adverse has come, neither a plague-infested breath nor the rumble of earthquakes.

Such was the Murcian Eden when Abú-Bekhr-al-Kaisí was its sovereign Emir; and here, in Castilian, follows what I read of it in Arabic.

A Muslim rawi says that Murcia is a tulip with the scent of jasmine, which God bestowed upon the sultan who turned her orchard-land into a garden;

that her orchard is an orchard-garden which yields, in its succulent soil, everything from the palm to the carnation, and a fruit more savory and sweeter than honey.

Murcia is a flask of essence, holding the thousand scents of every bloom that science today goes searching for through forests, valleys, and hills;

the flora and the plants, the vegetables and grains of the richest yields and the most vital substances from the richest regions.

A land where everything is bred, be it tilled by council or taifa; where all grows sweet and refined, from the citron to the almond, from the fig to the jujube;

from the sacred laurel of Pindus to the orange tree of China; from the sour cherry of Toro to the tart tamarind of Egypt and of Palestine;

from the spikenard and the white lily to the balsam-scented acacia: from the rustic verbena and the humble mint, to the cinnamon-tree of Aleppo.

From the mimosas and sensitive plants that shrink from the touch, to the silvery poplar; from the glossy carob tree, to the dull everlasting flowers.

From the Bergamask mulberry whose fruit is stained blood-red, to the muscat grape of Corinth, and the peach of Damascus, to the terebinth of Syria.

Murcia, favorite of the sun, which bathes her in golden light, blessed by both Allah and Jehovah, is an Arab mosque crowned by the Cross.

Murcia is a flowering pavilion, the hiding-place of a houri who fled Eden without a sound; a heavenly lark, who came down to build herself a nest there.

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This is what a Moor says of Murcia in telling this tradition, of which I made a translation: without my vouching for either its truth or my translation.

The legend of the Moorish rawi, told by the Christian poet

One day He wished to watch the march of the worlds and see if creation obeyed his law, and down to the golden gates of Paradise came the supreme God who had drawn creation's embryo from chaos.

From the Edenic mansion he reached the peristyle; the angel who keeps watch there opened wide his pavilion, and from the ethereal summit, from that tranquil verge, Allah examined the march of the universe.

What men call the void and the firmament, the blue air that for us is the sky; the infinite space, the life-giving element of its million worlds, unfolded at his feet.

The nebulae, worlds still in the making, which one day, after long evolution, will be suns, the pale stars, cold as the moon, which are the sparks and satellites of aged suns;

the swift comets with their measureless tails, the wonder of the worlds, which travel into view by God's laws of balance — the only laws that give them motion, impulse, pull, and light;

all that mysterious realm which still stays dark and which human science is just beginning to glimpse, all that which one day, surely, by virtue of our divine nature, we must fathom and understand;

all that which moves, congeals, and dissolves, which glows and glitters as it spins along, all that which comes and goes, that dies and is reborn, which eclipses and shines, whether loose or fixed in place;

all that, whether world or atom, leashed or free, flung outward or drawn inward by some central power, lives by something, and moves, and rolls wrapped in something that either quickens or weakens its living evolution;

all that seen bundled together from the earth, all that makes up the starry region, the murky and the visible that the universe holds, whatever together forms what creation is,

presented itself to the sight of God, who wished to see it: with a single glance God saw that it functioned well, and his eye fixed on the earth, which moves like a pearl in the necklace of worlds on which Eden was strung.

And that pearl, black on its shadowed hemisphere, and white on its lit side because it mirrors the sun, had upon it a green point which, like a strip of carpet, carpeted a stretch of Spanish ground.

It was then the end of a month of January: the earth was weathering a general storm of snow and of cyclones, and between the fierce force of earthquakes and of the storm, it fared badly.

As today, an atmosphere of fog and whirlwind surrounded it, veiling its natural color: and that strip so green, of emerald brightness and emblem of hope, that spring-time verdure

amid the snows, perhaps seemed to the Lord one of the follies native to Spain; and watching the globe follow its path along its orbit, the Creator remained intent and absorbed.

The angel, who stood silent, keeping watch over the ivory steps of the golden peristyle, remained submissively awaiting his will, seeing, as He did, the world's thousand marvels.

From that staircase and ivory flight of steps, like a royal carpet, a tapestry for a royal dais, there rose, splendid, upon ground of beaten silver, a marvelous hanging garden of living green.

Everything there was alive upon its white floor, the trees, the plants, the flower, and the spring; and the tree which the earth has called the Tree of Paradise filled that air with a celestial fragrance.

And with everything in harmony and each in its precise place, the garden was a whole of complete perfection, the mystic seed-bed where God chose to store the seeds that nourish universal life.

The trees and the flowers glowed and breathed out fragrance, the plant, the grass… all of it, perfume and radiance: myriads of birds, sylphs, and flying insects, luminous butterflies and singing birds, fanned and swayed the tree and the flower.

And over this outer Eden, an abridgment of the other, which our clouded minds cannot fully grasp, the living vestibule of the Edenic mansion, watched that beautiful heavenly creature who raised, before God, the pavilion at heaven's gate.

The angel was a being without equal among creatures, a prodigy of beauty, a sculptural model; a being whose form, though of human likeness, was raised to sovereign celestial beauty.

Across his back there folded, light as sea-foam, two wings of white plumage of delicate weave, which fell like a snowy mantle, lending to his bearing the grace and the whiteness of the gentlest swan.

A halo of light crowns and encircles his head, like the glow that tints the sky with morning whiteness; and from his body and his breath there rises and escapes a fragrance that surpasses even Edenic amber.

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The Creator and the angel, whose divine essence needs neither language nor voice to speak to one another, carried out, a work of their souls' intelligence, the swift transmission of their mutual thoughts.

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'Do you see the earth? 'I see it, 'What is that green spot of Spain in so raw a winter? 'I do not know: amid the mist the line of my sight is lost, Lord; but if you order it, I will go and find out. 'Go!' thought God; and the angel, feeling the force and the command of God's 'Go!,' which God had not shaped with gesture or word, drawing in his breath and casting himself into the void, spread wide his wings.

Lightning and the telegraph, whose speed and power man has learned to master and subdue, are useless terms, calculations lost in vain, for measuring the swiftness of the angel's flight.

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The worlds of the many planetary systems, some still embryonic and poorly evolved; others overflowing with living light and force, now in their age of active vital condensation; the old ones, worn and spent, growing cold and drained, floating in the void with fading motion; the moon, the sun, the suns of unknown planets, and the stars and comets of our own blue region, beheld him for an instant, leaving behind, where he flew, a trail of light and fragrance, pass by like a whirlwind.

God saw his moving form, white and luminous, go first like a candid wandering dove, then like a weightless and white butterfly, then like a firefly, small and restless, that flits among the shoots of a garden's grass, enter our atmosphere, draw close to the globe, touch the green spot of the Spanish border, and there, like a patch of water that evaporates and fades, vanish at last upon its green spot.

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God, seeing that his creation went on, perfect, in proper unity and functioning well, climbed back up the ivory stairway of the golden peristyle, and calmly returned to enter Eden.

Everything, with its breath, returned into blissful Eden, to enter into rest, and God to enter into himself.

There, time has neither count nor measure; but in order to recount here the spans and phases of that life, one must fit the phrases of our crude language to those spoken there.

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The shadows were beginning to darken the day, and the angel had not returned… God said: 'What can he be doing there?'

The world was soon about to enter, under night's dusky folds, into its dark dominion, and, while alive it fills the hollow of the infinite, was soon to go to rest amid the shadows.

The twilight light still cast, upon the thousand worlds of infinite space, pale golden gleams; but already, in their shifting hues, opal and topaz were beginning to be stained with tints of livid purple.

The earth, buffeted by gusts of cyclones, by floods and snowfalls in a cruel winter, rolled on amid murky, leaden storm-clouds, showing only the bright patch of that green spot.

Springing up from it (be it plain, valley, or hill), like a fleeting phosphorescent firefly, growing larger with each instant… first like a snow-white dove, then like an eagle… something took flight that takes from the comet its force and its course, advancing among the stars with a fearsome flight: that, like an electric spark, appears now here, now there, hides and reappears, leaving all around it its atmospheres swollen with an intoxicating scent, and in a trembling wake of faint, glimmering light, leaving awe and wonder behind… it is the angel returning to God, beating his condor wings.

He swept past Hesperus, swift and silent, for he was returning late before the face of God; blindly he crossed Saturn's golden ring, leapt past the boundary of the air, and vanished in a flash.

God perceived his flight and understood his haste, however much he tried to muffle the sound of it; and God came out to meet him with a fatherly smile, just as the angel arrived, in a submissive bearing, to alight upon the ivory steps of the portico.

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God loved his angel, for the Lord is good; before Him the angel felt a blush and timidity; and though the Lord showed toward him no trace of anger, the angel, for the first time, felt confused.

Before God's spirit he remained confused, for there he felt God, yet did not see God; God, in his mercy, placed him with Him and within himself, and so, without voice, in solitude the two spoke: 'What was that green thing? 'Murcia. 'Why were you gone so long? 'Because I forgot the hours and my errand there. 'Then what is there? 'Another glory. 'Is it so? 'It is enchanting! 'Then tell me what you saw. 'Well… 'What? 'That I saw nothing. 'You saw nothing in a whole day? 'Reason enough to give of it as your messenger — no; I saw nothing, Lord. I caught the scent of the spring-like climate, of the lovely country, but I never crossed beyond its outer edge. 'Why not? 'Because at the entrance of the first ravine, I came upon a very slight, graceful country girl, and there I stayed in conversation, rambling on with her, until I saw a star shine out… and I turned back. 'Was the peasant girl so lovely? 'She is; though not a wonder. 'What bewitched you? 'Her voice, and what I heard her say. 'What did she speak of? 'Of flowers, of country tales, of rustic labors; but she spoke so well that I would still be listening to her wandering stories: but the day was dying… and I returned to Eden. 'But are her tales and her words truly such that they can hold rapt and so enchant, there on earth, even heavenly beings? 'No houri ever knew how to tell the like.

Her voice is a music of magical harmony, her tales a poetry of oriental spirit; in every tale of hers the plot is a poem of the utmost perfection, of an original cut.

The tone is pitched with which she tells them, with a vibration of silver and in notes of crystal; and the rhythm of her languid and strange chant holds within it a harmony of unequalled charm.

Sultana of the flowers they might call her there; here the houris would call her sister; paganism might well have taken her for Flora, the night for the dawn, the hummingbirds for a flower.

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Hearing the angel's poetic portrayal, Allah remained a moment lost in thought within himself: and then said to the angel: 'Of that creature prove to me what you tell me: repeat what she said to you.

And the angel, conveying by intuitive grace, as if living speech, his thought to God, took the earthly phrases stored in his memory, turning them into the rhythms of his own celestial tongue, and, stringing them like pearls one after another, sent them on to God in a living current of soundless waves, and in the smoke of a fragrance created and drawn in by the two of them at once

THE POEM OF THE FLOWERS

For the delight of man on earth, Allah created these four things: flowers, perfumes, horses, and women. THE KORAN.

'When winter banishes the flowers, and in the earth, in their mother's shelter, they sleep, they are the seed of the incense that the earth holds in store for God.

The wild ones, that in April open their small petals to the sun, the rain, and the breezes, are the winks and the smiles of the mountains and the thickets.

Those that in the lush season of spring cover the woodland in yellow, gold, and crimson, are the festive garment in which the countryside adorns itself.

Those that in full bloom give it such peerless beauty, are the first offering that Nature makes to Him who made creation.

God and the people love flowers; God keeps them upon his altars, and for the people they are the finest adornments and delights in their popular festivals.

All human beings receive them with affection in mourning as in pleasure: the child carries them to the grave and women to their parties.

Beloved of the light of day, the joy of the birds, the mantle and jewels of the garden, they give the air their ambrosia and the bees their honey.

They are the language of love, the message of weddings, the pledge of marriage, the offering of gratitude, the homage paid to glory.

Whoever takes no pleasure in flowers, to what can he aspire? Whoever does not admire their colors, nor is rapt by their scents, what can he have in his heart?'

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He fell silent, and the angel awaited the Lord's judgment; in the Edenic garden not a fleeting echo, not a sound; around God and the angel everything remained withdrawn into itself and mute, in silent expectation.

The will of the One and Almighty God was not expressed in any formula of speech, nor with a voice: his hidden will he conveyed to the angel, and, rapt, all creation understood it together with Him.

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'So faithful a worshiper, with such loyal faith in me, so gentle a flower-tender, of so subtle a spirit, so skilled in her labor and so masterful in her singing, is a creature who is not well-placed there.

The life of the spirit does not belong on the base earth, the believing and virgin almée deserves to dwell here; let everything be in its own element! the flower in the garden, the star in space, and in Eden, the houri.'

No sooner was God's will conceived than the angel, a second time, spread wide his wings.

The night was calm, the moon already setting, over the Murcian orchard-land all lay at peace in rest: not a wandering breeze stirred the leaves as it passed, nor did the faintest sound wake the slightest echo.

In her dwelling, free of sorrow or care, rests the country girl the angel had found: she has no parents; her dead have left her alone; she grew up among the flowers, like a closed bud of a rose in a bloom the sun never warmed.

An old man of her tribe, of Damascene origin, who had spent eighty years in studying and observing, held as a good man among both Christians and Arabs, and as wise as the Arabs are capable of being,

adopted her as a small child, and grew fond of her; and as childhood and old age are two extremes, they touched and fused together: and along the very trail of old age, childhood walked along, obedient.

The tales with which the old man lulled her to sleep as a child, the seed of virtue he planted in her spirit, the knowledge of plants that the old man instilled in her… her natural passion for birds and flowers, the faith and the poetry he inoculated into her soul,

made of that child an angel here on earth, a skilled horticulturist once she became a woman; she made herself a florist and ornithologist throughout the hills; she was the idol and delight of all that Murcia holds, and the two of them, sharing one soul, became a single being.

The wretched Christian captives called her María; the Arabs called her Myriam; the wise old man called her Murayma; the elders, Gazelle; the people and the farm-folk, Sultana of the Flowers, and Sultan Abú-al-Kaisí, the houri of his gardens.

That creature, the delight of all who knew her, as light as a sylph, like an ideal houri, like an alluring almée, like an innocent turtledove, slept with a sleep of virginal calm.

She slept, but she dreamed: a fantastic, beguiling dream it was, clearer and more perceptible than any natural dream: more a vision than a dream, and at once both a fantastic and a real phenomenon.

She dreamed she saw, in the faint glow of dawn, a Spirit singing beneath her balcony; and she heard and understood, of his resounding song, both the music and the words, feeling that she heard and saw.

She dreamed she saw and heard the figure, the voice, and the words of a being and a song; and the being was the youth she had met in the thicket, and his singing a rhythm never heard before.

Her dream, a mystic pleasure of heavenly enjoyment, was a swoon, an ecstasy of spiritual love, without her chaste delight ever sprouting or showing a single tainted atom of carnal sensation.

And the vision, the rhythm, the very idea of the phrase of his song instilled in her so mystic a pleasure as her soul would feel were it to float free of matter, to change its state of being.

The suggestion of that hypnotic dream, alone, held her fast to the pleasure of seeing and hearing; rocking within her dream, as upon its gentle waves the seagulls and the seabirds rock.

And in so intimate an enjoyment, unknown and pleasing, unaware of herself, wholly withdrawn within, she received the suggestion of the dream and the serenade; whose rhythmic stanzas said something like this:

for in human language it would be senseless of me to claim I could render it here in translation: my wit, powerless here, recounts the tradition imperfectly, as best it can: it only seeks to give you, of the divine story told by the Arab rawi, the closest sense, and the broadest rendering, the nearest thing to that something I myself can grasp.

THE SERENADE

Nurturing being, who seem neither conceived nor engendered by any being born of woman, you who upon this earth exist through a mystery locked within you;

white houri, who, fleeing heaven, said: 'I shall be the delight of men,' turn your flight back, rise up, and come with me to heaven.

Heavenly being, poorly lodged on earth, with whom would you wish to be paired here, or how could you wish to dwell among its men and women?

What will you find in the regions of this hemisphere to give you nourishment or refreshment: what dwelling, what garment, what furnishing, or what tool?

You who bathe in light, who feed on ambrosia and nectar, who breathe out poetry and amber, and who can spread the angel's own wings;

white, for May forged you out of lilies; golden, for a ray of sun gilds you; graceful and lovely as an archangel, pure as a star,

the sun lends your eyes a reflection of its light, the moon serves as a mirror for your face, and the doves coo to you on your balcony when you appear.

To see you on earth the flowers open and God throws open heaven's watch-towers; and your sisters the houris blow you kisses from behind their shutters.

Houri, who fled heaven because God willed that the earth should glimpse something of Paradise, turn your flight homeward, or on my wings return to heaven.

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In the ecstatic swoon of that mysterious dream, rapt and enraptured, she felt an unknown, irresistible power taking possession of her, transforming her original being into another.

In the final words of that serenade Myriam received an irresistible command: and driven by the unknown power that swept her up, she believed she was flying through the blue emptiness of the air.

Dreaming that she flew, she felt herself launched through the empty region she was crossing. She dreamed that she was flying and rising up to Eden… and it was true: the angel was already carrying her away.

When he reached the heights of the empyrean region, the angel set Myriam down before the Lord: God looked upon her: and, rapt, the creature felt, without fear or shame, that God was judging her.

God saw that her virgin soul was pure of blemish, that in her Adam's leaven had not fermented, and in the heavenly mansion he marked out a place for her, leaving her at the gate of Edenic bliss in the place of the angel, whom he took away with him.

The human creature turned into a divine being; her bodily substance became immaterial; and the happy country girl who had come to Paradise remained there, guardian of its gate and dweller in its garden.

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And there are kabyles and tribes, natives of Murcia, today wandering about Fez and Tlemcen, who believe that it is not the angel but the Murcian houri who will open the gates of Eden to their souls.