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'By our Lady, he cried, 'I must see to this; although my poor feet have no skin below them. I will teach this heathen miscreant how to scoff at Glastonbury. Thereupon he turned his course, and ploughed along through the moors and bogs, towards the eight-sided palace. The wizard sat on his chair of comfort, and with the rankest contempt observed the holy man ploughing towards him.
In a square pool, the water, previously unconfined, becometh a square; in a six-sided pool it becometh a hexagon, in an eight-sided pool an octagon, and so forth. The rain itself hath no geometry, no limits, no form, but it taketh on one form or another, according to the restrictions of its vessel.
Though the chancel is square inside, the corners outside are cut off by a very broad chamfer, and a very curious ogee curve unites the two. The cloisters to the north are more usual. The arches are round or slightly pointed, and like the short round columns with their moulded eight-sided caps and sides, are of Arrabida marble.
Close above these openings is a simple cornice on which stand rather high and narrow battlements; within them rises a short eight-sided spire, and at each corner a short round turret capped by a conical roof. The whole from top to bottom is plastered and whitewashed, and it is this glaring whiteness more than anything else which gives to the whole so Eastern a look.
My bar thus sharpened formed an eight-sided dagger, and would have done justice to a first-rate cutler. No one can imagine the toil and trouble I had to bear, nor the patience required to finish this difficult task without any other tools than a loose piece of stone. I put myself, in fact, to a kind of torture unknown to the tyrants of all ages.
The nave is a short one of three irregular bays, and over the last, which precedes the choir, is the little eight-sided dome, which instead of projecting above the roof is curiously placed a little lower than the tunnel vaulting of the other bays.
If any inquisitive person, therefore, had been bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the gallery to look down into the choir, he could have seen nothing but the tall eight-sided windows of stained glass beyond the high altar.
Before we knew it they were upon us! I have been in any one of the three separately many a time. In '95 off the Blue Canary Islands I was caught in an octoroon, one of those eight-sided storms, that spun our ship around like a top, and killed all the canaries for miles about the sea was strewn with their bodies. But this! "Below," bellowed Captain Triplett, and we made a dive for the hatch.
Then the buttress becomes eight-sided and smaller, and, surrounded by five thick growths, of which not a square inch is unworked and whose pinnacles are covered with carving, rises with many a strange moulding to a high round pinnacle bearing the cross of the order a sign, if one may take the coral and the trees to be symbolical of the distant seas crossed and of the new lands visited, of the supreme control exercised by the order over all missions.
Indeed the Roman temple and the cathedral are perhaps the only old buildings which seem to be distinctly Western, and even the cathedral has some trace of the East in its two western spires, one round and tiled, and the other eight-sided and plastered. For long Evora was one of the chief towns of the kingdom, and was one of those oftenest visited by the kings.
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