d 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.

Coral-like mouldings too run round the western windows on both north and
south sides, and at the bottom these are bound together with basket
work.

Strange as are the details of these buttresses, still more strange are
the windows of the chapter-house. Since about 1560 the upper cloister of
the Filippes has covered the south side of the church so that the south
chapter-house window, which now serves as a door, is hidden away in the
dark. Still there is light enough to see that in naturalism and in
originality it far surpasses anything elsewhere, except the west window
of the same chapter-house. Up the jambs grow branches bound round by a
broad ribbon. From the spaces between the ribbons there sprout out on
either side thick shoots ending in large thistle heads. The top of the
opening is low, of complicated curves and fine mouldings, on the
outermost of which are cut small curly leaves, but higher up the
branches of the jambs with their thistle heads and ribbons with knotted
ropes and leaves form a mass of inextricable intricacy, of which little
can be seen in the dark except the royal arms.

Inside the vault is Gothic and segmental, but the west window is even
more strange than the southern; its inner arch is segmental and there
are window seats in the thickness of the wall. The jambs have large
round complicated bases of many mouldings, some enriched with leaves,
some with thistle heads, some with ribbons, and one with curious
projections like small elephants' trunks--in short very much what a
Western mind might imagine some Hindu capital, reversed, to be like. On
the jamb itself and round the head are three upright mouldings held
together by carved basket work of cords, and bearing at intervals
thistle heads in threes; beyond is another band of leaf-covered carving,
and beyond it an upright strip of wavy lines.[117] The opening has a
head like that of the other window and is filled with a bronze grille.

Still more elaborate and extraordinary is the outside of this window,
nor would it be possible to find