All is naked and bare, without a softening line
or gentler shadow, lying fallow in spring, unwatered in drought, and
ungarnered at harvest time.

The Tagus rushes round the city in the shape of a horseshoe, confining
and protecting it as the Wear does the towers of Durham. It boils and
eddies 'twixt its narrow, rocky confines, hurrying from the gloomy
shadows to the sunshine below, through which it slowly sweeps, murky and
coffee-colored, to the horizon, no life between its flat banks, no
commerce to mark it as a highway.

You pass over the high-arched Alcantara Bridge, which the Campeador and
his kinsman, Alvar Fanez, crossed with twelve hundred horsemen at their
back, to demand justice from their sovereign. A broad terrace crawls
like a serpent up the steep incline to the city gates. A forest of
soaring steeples rises above you, topped by the square bulk of the
Alcazar.

The city smells sleepy. The narrow streets, or rather alleys, of the
town wind tortuously around the stucco facades, with no apparent
starting-point or destination, as confused as a skein of worsted after a
kitten has played with it. Thus were they laid out by the wise Arabs, to
afford shade at all hours of the day. At every corner, one runs into
some detail of historical or artistic interest,--history and
architecture here wander hand in hand.

Huge, wooden doors, closely studded with scallop nails as big as a man's
fist, proud escutcheons of noble races lost to all save Spain's history;
charming glimpses of interior courtyards and gardens glittering fresh in
their emerald coloring, and sweet with the scent of orange blossoms;
Gothic crenelations, Renaissance ironwork and railing, and Moorish
capitals and ornamentation, all pell-mell, the styles of six centuries
often appearing in the same building. More than a hundred churches and
chapels and forty monasteries crumble side by side within the small
radius of the city. Half of its area was once covered by religious
buildings or mortmain property.

II

The church, be it a grand cathedral or the humble steeple of some little
hamlet, is always the connecting link between past and present. It has
been the highest artistic expression of the people, and it remains an
eloquent witness to continuity and tradition. It is what makes later
ages most forcibly "remember," for it seeks to embody and satisfy the
greatest need of the human heart.

The history of a great cathedral church of Spain is so clo