ch crown the walls of the nave and
side-aisle chapels,--the two lower quite Gothic. The thrust of the naves
is met by great buttresses flying out over the roofs of the side aisles,
and there, as well as above the buttresses of the chapel walls,
pinnacles rise like the masts in a great shipyard. The whole organism of
the late Spanish Gothic church lies open before you. The long stretch of
the three tiers of walls is broken by the face of the transept, the door
of which is blocked, while the surrounding buttresses and walls are
covered with canopies and brackets, all vacant of statues. In place of
the condemned door, there is one leading into the second bay, the Puerta
de los Ramos or de las Palmas, in feeling very similar to the main doors
of the west. Its semicircular arches support a relief representing
Christ entering Jerusalem. A circular light flanked by Peter and Paul
comes above, and the whole is encased in a series of broken arches
filled with the most intricate carving.

The grand and the grandiloquent Cathedral seem to gaze out over the town
and the vast plain of the old kingdom of Leon and to listen. It is a
golden town, of a dignity one gladly links with the name of Castile. It
is a city--or what is left of it after the firebrands of Thiebaut, of
Ney, and of Marmont--of the sixteenth century, of convents and churches
and huge ecclesiastical establishments. They rise like amber mountains
above the squalid buildings crumbling between them, and stand in grilled
and latticed silence. Las Duenas lies mute on one side and on the other
San Esteban, where the great discoverer pleaded his cause to deaf ears.
In the evening glow their brown walls gain a depth and warmth of color
like the flush in the dark cheeks of Spanish girls.

II

BURGOS

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF BURGOS

West front]

Whereat he wondred much, and gan enquere
What stately building durst so high extend
Her lofty towres unto the starry sphere.

_The Faerie Queene_, book I, c. x, lvi.

I

The best view of the spires of Burgos is from the ruined walls of the
Castillo high above the city. From these crumbling ramparts, pierced and
gouged by a thousand years of assault and finally rent asunder by the
powder of the Napoleonic armies, you look directly down upon the
mistress of the city and the sad and ardent plain. A stubbly growth,
more like cocoa matting than grass, covers the unroofed floor beneath
your feet. From