words to describe it.

The jambs are of coral branches, with large round shafts beyond,
entirely leaf-covered and budding into thistle heads. Ropes bind them
round at the bottom and half-way up great branches are fastened on by
chains. At the top are long finials with more chains holding corals on
which rest armillary spheres. The head of the window is formed of
twisted masses, from which project downwards three large thistle heads.
Above this is a great wreath of leaves, hung with two large loops of
rope, and twisting up as a sort of cusped ogee trefoil to the royal arms
and a large cross of the Order of Christ. A square frame with flamelike
border rises to the top of the side finials to enclose a field cut into
squares by narrow grooves. Below the window more branches, coral, and
ropes knot each other round the head of Ayres just below the rope
moulding which runs across from buttress to buttress. Above the top of
the opening and about half-way up the whole composition there is an
offset, and on it rests a series of disks, set diagonally and strung on
another rope. (Fig. 56.)

Although, were the royal arms and the cross removed, the window might
not look out of place in some wild Indian temple, yet it is much more
likely not to be Indian, but that the shafts at the sides are but the
shafts seen in many Manoelino doors, that the window head is an
elaboration of other heads,[118] that the coral jambs are another form
of common naturalism, and that the great wreath is only the hood-mould
rendered more extravagant. In no other work in Portugal or anywhere in
the West are these features carved and treated with such wild
elaboration, nor anywhere else is there seen a base like that of the
jambs inside, but surely there is nothing which a man of imagination
could not have evolved from details already existing in the country.

Above the window the details are less strange. A little higher than the
cross a string course traverses the front from north to south, crested
with pointed cusps. Higher up still, a round window, set far back in a
deep splay, lights the church above. Outside the sharp projecting outer
moulding of this window are rich curling leaves, inside a rope, while
other ropes run spirally across the splay, which seems to swell like a
sail, and was perhaps meant to remind all who saw it that it was the sea
that had brought the order and its master such riches and power. At the
top are the royal arms crowned, and