here he names Perugina for the second time), stopped painting, whether for disinterest or lack of talent. 89. Distant Mandate This chapter tries to find some truth about the Alhambra by asking several questions of it. First, the narrator asks 'what is its name,' which there is no answer for, because no contemporary documents exist, and many Islamic Golden Age buildings were never given names. Next, there is the question of when it was built; there are records and indications of fortresses on that spot dating to Roman conquests, but no indication of when it became the Alhambra. For the question of who built it, the widely accepted answer is that the Alhambra in its essence was completed either by Yusuf I, his son Mohammed V, or a continuum of both. But what was Alhambra used for? That there are no extant contemporary documents hides the truth. Professor Grabar of Harvard and Michigan, contends that the Alhambra was not a palace, fortress, or otherwise, but that it exists for its own sake. Its walls, beauty, and architecture are all 'extant,' but they exist to be self-evident of the Alhambra. The narrator now shifts to a hypothetical tourist visiting the Alhambra. After passing through the wall, and being asked to pay for an expensive entrance ticket, he enters and is overwhelmed by the beauty, wandering room from room. His experience, should he be attentive and aware, would be that he feels like he isn't going the 'right way' through the rooms, and that the entrance wasn't even proper grand entrance, but rather an opening, chosen at random into a room. Each room is wholly contained and true on its own--the rooms seem not to be connected in a conscious or logical way (at least to the Western mind), but somehow the beauty of the building is greater for this. The narrator then describes the Persian girih and its influence on the stonework throughout the Alhambra, and how its collection of disparate geometrical shapes form a perfect whole that looks either simple or complex based on the viewer's distance. All of this hidden truth, all of this beauty is dazzling and overwhelming to the visitor, which must lead you to say that there is indeed truth about the Alhambra, and that that truth is the Alhambra. 144. Something Is Burning Outside A group of artists visit Lacul Sfânta Ana on retreat to