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Here the tracery is very much less elaborate than in the Claustro Real at Batalha, but as scarcely a square inch of the whole cloister is left uncarved the effect is much more disturbed and so less pleasing.
Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by time that it is deemed more interesting to display the whole of you, clothed, as it were, in innocence.
The short walks have tunnel vaults with cross-vaults in the corners and in parts of the north aisle. Great piers and small, firm columns support the outer arches; and on the exterior of the Cloister the little arches of the columns are enclosed in a large round arch. Many of the capitals are uncarved, some of the piers have applied columns, but many are ornamented in straight cut lines.
It must have been the work of many, many years, perhaps of generations, of the people who had lavished so much skilful toil on that centre, which was about a couple of hundred feet in width, and rose up terrace above terrace six or seven hundred feet before the plain uncarved rock was reached, in whose clefts tree, shrub, and creeper grew abundantly for a similar distance, while to right and left the cell-like windows right up to the top of the canon finished off as before intimated, something like the crenellations on the top of a Norman castle.
The floor beneath the feet of the Californian heiress was bare, and the heavy furniture was of uncarved mahogany. But a satin quilt covered the bed, lavish Spanish needlework draped chest and tables, and through the open window came the June sunshine and the sound of the splashing fountain.
It is presumable that the bough may go on behind the uncarved portions of the board to reappear in another place, but we need not insist upon the fancy, which loses all its power when attention is called to it, like riddles when the answer is known.
Now almost every church is full of huge masses of gilt wood, in which hardly one square inch has been left uncarved; sometimes, if there is nothing else, and the whole church walls and ceiling alike is a mass of gilding and painting, the effect is not bad, but sometimes the contrast is terrible between the plain grey walls of some old and simple building and the exuberance behind the high altar.
In the plaster of the walls were indented in slight relief the fourteen stations of the Cross; a small stone image of the Mother of God stood in a corner, with an iron-work candlestick before it, and on the solid uncarved stone altar, raised on a stone step, stood six more iron candlesticks and an iron crucifix.
On either hand was a continuous wall of forest, and where an attempt had been made to push it back the uncarved bush projected like rocky promontories. The houses passed at wide intervals were shanties; the clearances in which they were set cluttered with stumps. How different now.
In 1890-1891 the ancient entrance-door was found behind the eighteenth-century additions. It is a simple square-headed door with semicircular opening above, made of Roman uncarved material, with consecration-crosses sunk in the lintel and base of the right-hand jamb; to the right and left of the lintel a little above it are two simple brackets with crosses on them.
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