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At length, standing high on its granite rock, you come to the Pena Palace, with its many domes, towers, and turrets, a royal palace, whence King Emanuel the Fortunate used to gaze out to sea, watching for the return of Vasco da Gama from his first expedition to India.

The most striking features of the old Palace in the town below are two tall chimneys, shaped like the tops of a couple of gigantic soda-water bottles. They belong to the royal kitchens, and were intended to carry off the fumes from the row of little charcoal fires along one side of the vast apartments, and on which in days gone by all the cooking was done. The kitchens have no ceiling at all, the walls simply narrowing in to form the chimneys, and I fear that in winter-time the poor cooks must have found it uncommonly draughty.

To enter this Palace you pass the old women who sit under their big umbrellas, selling oranges at the corner of the little market-square, and, taking no notice of a sleepy sentry, who as often as not leans propped up against the gateway, you walk into the courtyard, and up a broad flight of steps.

Most noticeable in the Palace are the exquisite old Moorish tiles set into the walls, and the painted wooden ceilings of some of the rooms.

There is one of these in which poor King Alfonso VI. was imprisoned for many years by his wife and younger brother, who usurped the throne. Whatever his faults may have been, one cannot help feeling sorry for the wretched man, who tramped up and down his prison till the stone paving became worn away in a groove.

Whilst on this subject, I must not forget to tell you about Portuguese prisons in general, and so I will describe the one at Cintra, which is a fair sample of the others. It has large unglazed windows looking on to the square, and behind a double row of iron cross-bars you see the haggard pale-faced prisoners, herded together in filth and squalor. They spend most of their time begging for alms from the passers-by. Sometimes their friends stand in the street below, and hold long conversations with them, or pass up food and tobacco in the prisoners’ long bag-shaped caps, which they lower by means of a string. The sentry who keeps guard outside takes no notice of these proceedings, for Portuguese criminals are allowed this one indulgence, perhaps to make up for their otherwise wretched lot.

[ CHAPTER X
] OBIDOS, LEIRIA, AND THOMAR