what the Alhambra is, that is to say we don’t know why it was built, what was its function — if we don’t view it as a residence, a private palace, or a fortification, because we don’t view it as that, then, well, how should we regard it? generally we don’t know, we have no idea at all, and this is difficult to explain, difficult, because now it seems as if everything is in order, one picks oneself up and travels to Granada, goes up the left bank of the Darro, then turns right and crosses above the Darro’s bubbling froth, reaches the road that leads to the Alhambra, drags himself up in the heat — for let us say that it’s summer and there is a dreadful, dry, scorching heat, and he has no parasol — and he buys the expensive entrance ticket, then a great surprise, more precisely an unpleasant surprise awaits him when at last, wandering with difficulty here and there up above, up here are all kinds of structures, from various gates to the chill, icy, unfinished, supposedly Renaissance palace of Charles V, but one feels that not one of them is it; then he finds it, because in the end, he finally realizes that it is there, at that little gate, where he has to go in, and then he finds out that he can’t go inside, that he has to wait, because visitors are only allowed in at certain intervals, and he is a visitor, he has to follow the rules, to wait in the inhuman parching heat, there is no refreshment stand, so accordingly he withdraws to a more shaded corner, and if he is lucky, and let’s assume that he is, then he has to wait for only twenty minutes, then he goes in and his jaw drops, because something like this, but like this, he says to himself, utterly stupefied, he has really, but really never even seen, this, the person says to himself, surpasses anyone’s imagination, but in the meantime it doesn’t even occur to him that something isn’t right; he thinks it is a royal palace, well yes, he reads the brief explanatory sheet that comes with the ticket, or he hears the bellowing of the tour guides, that Yusuf I, was it not, and his son Mohammed V, they were the ones who created this wondrous masterwork, this unsurpassable wonder of the Muslim Moors, he hears this and he reads the same, and it never even occurs to him to question whether this is a palace, or a fortress, or perhaps a private residence, or all of these things together — why, what else could it be? — well, the sultan lived here, or didn’t he? and here, living in his proximity, was the ocean of courtiers, and the women of the harem, courtly life, in a word, went on, there were huge feasts, splendid concerts, glittering receptions, the renowned baths, radiant celebrations and, well, of course, because this too is known, there were the thousands of ugly intrigues and machinations, secret associations and plots, and danger and murder, and chaos and blood and collapse, after which there always came the next sultan from the Nasrid dynasty, in a word everything went on just like it should in such a sultanate, one thinks to oneself, or perhaps doesn’t even think, as the images already precede the thoughts, when that which a person is thinking about gives rise to just one question, yet a question that remains unspoken because, well, who would ask it, maybe the tourist guide with his hand-held megaphone? — no, really no, the suspicion does not even arise within him that he now in such a place, for the first time in his life — because in the world there is only one such place as this, the Alhambra, where innumerable signs indicate that everything here, called only by their Spanish names — from the Patio de los Arrayanes to the Sala de la Barca, the Patio de Comares to the Patio de los Leones, the Sala de las Dos Hermanas to the Mirador de la Daraxa — everything here does not constitute a palace but something else; innumerable signs indicate to the visitor taking part in the immortal beauty of the Alhambra, that no, this is neither a fortress nor a palace, not even a private residence, but again and again — something else, and well, here, then we start with the walls, about which we should first know that they were originally whitewashed with lime, so that from below, from today’s Granada, or concretely the Darro or the Albacín quarter which once provided the Alhambra with water, the predecessor of the Alhambra was white, not red, and that is enough here about the name just one last time, but what is much more important is that these walls, for the most part towers connected to each other haphazardly — no matter what kind of well-intentioned expert sets to examining them — they were suitable for many purposes but it becomes ever more certain that they did not truly protect whoever was the ruler of the Alhambra, so then what were the walls for, what were they protecting: the Alhambra, fine, but from what, because in a military sense they were not really capable of defending anything; their significance, however, is as obvious as anything else in the Alhambra, or in relation to the Alhambra, so that then here, in the matter of the walls it is not really possible to arrive at any other decision than that the walls of the Alhambra — it is of course the outer walls of which we are speaking — did not provide any function of defense, but that their construction. . perhaps. . was intended as a kind of manifestation, namely to manifest that these walls were on the one hand like those of a fortress, accordingly high and wall-like, hence they could unconditionally protect something, something located behind them, yet on the other hand the people who commissioned these walls wanted to indicate that life within was unassailable, that it was not possible to enter here, not possible to breach these walls, and it was not even allowed, perhaps this sort of deliberation lay in the depths of the wishes of those who ordered it, who knows, no one has ever seen their specific plans, neither Yusuf I nor Mohammed V left any sort of trace behind as to what they were thinking when they built these walls here in this state, we can only guess, just as we also guessed as to why generally no written trace was left concerning the construction of the Alhambra, because nothing remained, and this still is not without precedent, for in the enormous territories of the Islamic empire, documents about this or that building are not too frequently available; it is however unprecedented that in the case of the Alhambra not even one single tiny piece of data has ever emerged about the construction itself, as if it would have been of particular importance to its commissioners that their work — how should one even express it, so as not to obscure things unnecessarily — would remain concealed, concealed in its essence, but by its appearance revealed, that is more or less the conclusion reached by one who lingers over these dilemmas, and this is just the beginning, really, because as one progresses in this Alhambra research, it will be ever more obvious that what earlier seemed self-evident here is anything but, that is to say that it can hardly be seen as an exception that in the case of a very old building, written sources do not survive, or that there are today very few experts to be found who can evoke, in spite of all their expertise, evidence, pertaining to how, for example, the days were spent in the Alhambra, or in any edifice, say, similar to the Alhambra; just that this complexity, this perfection appears to manifest itself as well in the concealment of any knowledge pertaining to the Alhambra at all; an attention extending to all things, that even of the tiniest, the most insignificant of facts, nothing at all should remain; this nonetheless causes one to ponder, because, well then, the question inevitably arises within one, if it isn’t this way because there were never any traces at all, it just appears that they were hidden, Professor Grabar, coming from the Marçais school, and towering far above the other scholars of the Alhambra as he is the only one who notices that in this wondrous masterwork there is too much obscurity, briefly he, an instructor at both the University of Michigan and Harvard, the son of André Grabar, wrote an entirely serious monograph about how the story of the Alhambra is in fact nothing but the story of a great conspiracy, and the Alhambra itself, in his view, is a singular attempt at the art of disguise, and clearly the reason why he thinks so, being a knowledgeable expert, is that he cannot resign himself to there being no explanation; it is simply palpable, as one reads onward in Grabar’s book, that this scholar of exceptional aptitude is hardly capable of conceiving that something could exist without a story, circumstance, cause, or goal; he can’t even conceive that its formation, its origination would have no logical continuity, to put it more forcefully, this Professor Grabar neither considers it possible, nor is capable of accepting, that an effect can appear without having been elicited by any cause, hence that ripples would appear on the lake’s tranquil surface without us having thrown a pebble into it, namely, in the case of the Alhambra that this, the Alhambra, could come into being without there being any real commission, and in addition, that the ones who commissioned it had no tangible intention and so on, but in the end Professor Grabar cannot, neither at Harvard nor at Michigan, cannot withstand that inasmuch as all of this is extant, that ultimately it all cannot