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ates the church. Thus from afar it seems as though the castle tower were part of the religious edifice, and the general appearance of the whole city surrounded by massive walls cannot be more warlike. The colour also of the ruddy sandstone and brick, brilliant beneath a bright blue sky, is characteristic of this part of Castile, and certainly constitutes one of its charms. What is more, the landscape is rendered more exotic or African by the Oriental appearance of the whole town, its castle, and its cathedral. The latter was begun and ended in the twelfth century; the first stone was laid in 1151, and the vaults were closed twenty-three years later, in 1174; consequently it is one of the unique twelfth-century churches in Spain completed before the year 1200. It is true that the original edifice has been deformed by posterior additions and changes dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Excepting these abominable additions, the primitive building is Romanesque; not Romanesque as are the cathedrals we have seen in Galicia, but Byzantine, or military Romanesque, showing decided Oriental influences. Would to Heaven the cathedral of Zamora were to-day as it stood in the twelfth century! [Illustration: ZAMORA CATHEDRAL] The form of the church is that of a basilica. Like the cathedral of Palencia, it lacks a western front; the apse is semicircular, strengthened by heavy leaning buttresses; the upper, towerless rim of this same body is decorated with an ogival festoon set off by means of the primitive pinnacles of the top of the buttresses. The northern (Renaissance or plateresque) front is, though beautiful and severe in itself, a calamity when compared with the Romanesque edifice, as is also the new and horrid clock-tower. The view of the southern end of the transept, as seen from the left, is the most imposing to be obtained of the building. Two flights of steps lead up to the Romanesque portal, flanked by three simple pillars, which support three rounded arches deeply dentated(!). Blind windows, similar in structure to the portal, occupy the second body of the facade, and are surmounted in their turn by a simple row of inverted crenelated teeth, showing in their rounded edges the timid use of the horseshoe arc. The superior body is formed by two concentric and slightly ogival arches embedded in the wall. The greatest attraction, and that which above all gives a warlike aspect to the whole building,
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