Another fine Moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in the patio below, and given to King Manuel by his brother-in-law, Charles V., as a very great rarity. Another large apartment, with a conical roof, was constructed by King Manuel himself, who gave to it the name of the hall of stags. Here the king collected the armorial achievements of all the Portuguese nobility. Seventy-four stags are ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of Tavora, which the great minister Pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—
“Pois com esforços e leaes
Servicios, foram ganhados,
Com estes e outros taes
Devem ser conservados.”
“By prowess stout and loyal fame
These honours bright were gained;
By others like or eke the same
They needs must be retained.”
The small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of tiled brick upon which the Sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the Council met, summoned by the rash young King Sebastian in 1578, to sanction the crusading attack upon Morocco upon which he had set his heart. All his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. But the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of Alcacer Kebir, ended the male line of the house of Avis which John I. had begun at Aljubarrota two hundred years before. In this gloomy chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of Sebastian his uncle Philip II. and his descendants became kings of Portugal for a century.