Few countries of the globe present to the eye of the traveller so desolate, so forbidding an aspect as that vast and arid peninsula which, embracing an area of more than a million square miles, stretches away through twenty-four degrees of latitude, from the confines of the Syrian Desert to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Its surface, while far from possessing the monotonous character with which popular fancy is accustomed to invest it, is, for the greater part of its extent, destitute of those physical advantages which tempt either the cupidity or the enterprise of man. Its coasts are low and unhealthy. Its harbors are few and unsafe. Its mineral resources are to this day unexplored and unknown. Its impenetrable deserts, guarded by a fierce and martial population, have always set at defiance the best-matured plans of invasion and conquest. In the principality of Yemen, appropriately named The Happy, the cultivation of the soil has flourished from time immemorial, but in almost every other province the returns of agricultural labor are discouraging and unremunerative. Illimitable wastes of sand, over which sweeps the deadly blast of the simoom; mountains, bald, craggy, and volcanic, whose slopes are destitute of every trace of vegetable life; plains strewn with blocks of tufa and basalt; valleys dotted here and there with stunted shrubs, or encrusted with a saline deposit similar to that upon the shores of the Dead Sea; a soil impregnated with nitre; such are, and have been from prehistoric times, the physical features of the Arabian Peninsula. No stream worthy of the name of river, dispensing wealth and fertility in its winding course to the sea, flows through this dreary and inhospitable land. Wherever a spring was found, a permanent settlement arose, and the black tents of the Bedouin gave place to huts of sun-dried bricks, while the dignity of the sheik, who now aspired to the title of prince, was satisfied with a dwelling superior to those of his subjects only in point of size. The oasis, generally suggestive of shady groves and purling streams, is often, in reality, nothing more than the dry bed of a mountain torrent, along whose borders a little withered vegetation furnishes the hardy camel with pasture, and where a scanty supply of brackish water can, by laborious digging, be obtained. Overhead glitters a sky of brass, unflecked by a single cloud, and, morning and evening, the rays of the sun, mellowed and refracted by the vapors of the earth, clothe every elevation with scarlet, azure, and violet tints which, blended in exquisite harmony, rival the splendors of the rainbow; developing, under the effects of radiation, optical illusions and charming pictures of the mirage, attributed by superstitious ignorance to the influence of enchantment. The unbroken stillness of the Desert, the wide expanse of uninhabited territory, produce a sense of mental depression, accompanied by an apprehension of danger from the convulsions of nature and the violence of man, which no experience seems able to remove; affecting even the sturdy camel-driver, familiar with these solitudes from childhood, who shudders as he urges his string of panting beasts over the drifted sand-heaps and through the mountain fastness, the reputed haunt of evil genii and the vantage ground from whence the murderous banditti oft beset the caravan. So deeply-rooted and tenacious is this feeling that the Arab regards a journey successfully performed as just cause for congratulation, and indeed not inferior to a triumph, as is indicated by his familiar proverb, “Travel is a victory.”

A good introductory picture of the Islamic presence in Spain, from the year 711 until the modern era.

In 1482, Abu Abdallah Muhammad XI became the twenty-third Muslim King of Granada. He would be the last. This is the first history of the ruler, known as Boabdil, whose disastrous reign and bitter defeat brought seven centuries of Moorish Spain to an end. It is an action-packed story of intrigue, treachery, cruelty, cunning, courtliness, bravery and tragedy. Basing her vivid account on original documents and sources, Elizabeth Drayson traces the origins and development of Islamic Spain. She describes the thirteenth-century founding of the Nasrid dynasty, the cultured and stable society it created, and the feuding which threatened it and had all but destroyed it by 1482, when Boabdil seized the throne. The new Sultan faced betrayals by his family, factions in the Alhambra palace, and ever more powerful onslaughts from the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs of the newly united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. By stratagem, diplomacy, courage and strength of will Boabdil prolonged his reign for ten years, but he never had much chance of survival. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, magnificently attired in Moorish costume, entered Granada and took possession of the city. Boabdil went into exile. The Christian reconquest of Spain, that has reverberated so powerfully down the centuries, was complete.