ing.

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

AVILA

From outside the walls]

The walls of the transept underneath the great blind wheels to the north
and south are broken by splendid windows, each with elaborate tracery
(as also the eastern and western walls), heavy and strong, but finely
designed. The glazing is glorious, light, warm, and intense. The walls
of the nave, set back above the lowest arcade some eighteen inches, have
triforium and clerestory, and above this again, they are filled quite up
to the vaulting with elaborate tracery, possibly once foolhardily
conceived to carry glass. Each bay has six arches in both triforium and
clerestory, all of simple and early apertures. The glazing of the
clerestory is white, excepting in one of the bays. In this single
instance, a simple, geometric pattern of buff and blue stripes is of
wonderfully harmonious and lovely color effect.

The shafts that separate nave from side aisles are still quite
Romanesque in feeling,--of polygonal core faced by four columns and
eight ribs. The capitals are very simple with no carving, but merely a
gilded representation of leafage, while the base molds carry around all
breaks of the pier. It may be coarse and crude in feeling and execution,
certainly very far from the exquisite finish of Leon, nevertheless the
infancy of an architectural style, like a child's, has the peculiar
interest of what it holds in promise. Like Leon, the side aisles have
double roofing, allowing the light to penetrate to the nave arcade and
forming a double gallery running round the church.

Many of the bishops who were buried in the choir in its old location
were, on its removal to the bay immediately west of the crossing, also
moved and placed in the various chapels. The sepulchre of Bishop Sancho
Davila is very fine. Like his predecessors, he was a fighting man. His
epitaph reads as follows:--

"Here lies the noble cavalier Sancho Davila, Captain of the King Don
Fernando and the Queen Dona Isabel, our sovereigns, and their alcaide of
the castles of Carmona, son of Sancho Sanches, Lord of San Roman and of
Villanueva, who died fighting like a good cavalier against the Moors in
the capture of Alhama, which was taken by his valor on the 28th of
February in the year 1490."

The pulpits on each side of the crossing, attached to the great piers,
are, curiously enough, of iron, exquisitely wrought and gilded. The one
on the side of the epistle is Gothic