Alas! how has the prophecy been falsified!  Many of the basins, where the fountains had once thrown up their sparkling showers, were dry and dusty.  Some of the palaces were turned into gloomy convents, and the barefoot monk paced through these courts, which had once glittered with the array, and echoed to the music, of Moorish chivalry.

In the course of his rambles, the student more than once encountered the old man of the library.  He was always alone, and so full of thought as not to notice any one about him.  He appeared to be intent upon studying those half-buried inscriptions, which, are found, here and there, among the Moorish ruins, and seem to murmur from the earth the tale of former greatness.  The greater part of these have since been translated; but they were supposed by many at the time, to contain symbolical revelations, and golden maxims of the Arabian sages and astrologers.  As Antonio saw the stranger apparently deciphering these inscriptions, he felt an eager longing to make his acquaintance, and to participate in his curious researches; but the repulse he had met with at the library deterred him from making any further advances.

He had directed his steps one evening to the sacred mount, which overlooks the beautiful valley watered by the Darro, the fertile plain of the Vega, and all that rich diversity of vale and mountain that surrounds Granada with an earthly paradise.  It was twilight when he found himself at the place, where, at the present day, are situated the chapels, known by the name of the Sacred Furnaces.  They are so called from grottoes, in which some of the primitive saints are said to have been burnt.  At the time of Antonio’s visit, the place was an object of much curiosity.  In an excavation of these grottoes, several manuscripts had recently been discovered, engraved on plates of lead.  They were written in the Arabian language, excepting one, which was in unknown characters.  The Pope had issued a bull, forbidding any one, under pain of excommunication, to speak of these manuscripts.  The prohibition had only excited the greater curiosity; and many reports were whispered about, that these manuscripts contained treasures of dark and forbidden knowledge.

As Antonio was examining the place from whence these mysterious manuscripts had been drawn, he again observed the old man of the library wandering among the ruins.  His curiosity was now fully awakened; the time and place served to stimulate it.  He resolved to watch this groper after secret and forgotten lore, and to trace him to his habitation.  There was something like adventure in the thing, that charmed his romantic disposition.  He followed the stranger, therefore, at a little distance; at first cautiously, but he soon observed him to be so wrapped in his own thoughts, as to take little heed of external objects.

They passed along the skirts of the mountain, and then by the shady banks of the Darro.  They pursued their way, for some distance from Granada, along a lonely road that led among the hills.  The gloom of evening was gathering, and it was quite dark when the stranger stopped at the portal of a solitary mansion.