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The town of Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, its discoloured ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this wilderness of Nature, a sixpence dropped on Sahara.
On leaving Alemquer, situated on the left bank, a new horizon appeared in view. In place of the curtain of forests which had shut them in up to then, our friends beheld a foreground of hills, whose undulations could be easily descried, and beyond them the faint summits of veritable mountains vandyked across the distant depth of sky.
Pero de Alemquer, who had been pilot to Bartholomew Diaz, was to regulate the course of the vessels. The crews, including ten criminals who were put on board to be employed on any dangerous service, amounted to one hundred and sixty persons. What feeble means these, what almost absurd resources, compared with the grandeur of the mission which these men were to accomplish!
On leaving Santa-Ellena, Pero de Alemquer, formerly pilot to Diaz, declared his belief that they were then ninety miles from the Cape, but in the uncertainty the fleet stood off to sea; on the 18th of November the Cape of Good Hope was seen, and the next day it was doubled by the fleet sailing before the wind.
Most of the Obydos townsfolk are owners of cacao plantations, which are situated on the low lands in the vicinity. Some are large cattle proprietors, and possess estates of many square leagues' extent in the campo, or grass-land districts, which border the Lago Grande, and other similar inland lakes, near the villages of Faro and Alemquer.
This chapel then is of great interest, not only because of the real beauty of its details but also because it was the first built of a type which was repeated more than once elsewhere, as, for instance, at Marceana near Alemquer, on the Tagus, and in the church of Nossa Senhora dos Anjos at Montemor-o-Velho, not far from São Marcos. Of the chapels at Montemor one at least was built by the same family, and in another where the reredos a very fine piece of carving represents a Piet
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