, the four sides had a balustrade running round
between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It
had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always
remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors
and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants
opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the
office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked
like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat
colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of
the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister
could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly
all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories.

It was the population of a whole town that lived above the Cathedral,
on a level with its roofs; and when night fell, and the staircase of
the tower was locked, it remained quite isolated from the city. This
semi-ecclesiastical tribe was born and died in the very heart of
Toledo without ever going down into the streets, clinging with
traditional instinct to the carved mountain of stone, whose arches
served it as a refuge. They lived saturated with the scent of incense,
breathing the peculiar smell of mould and old iron belonging to
ancient buildings, and with no more horizon than the arches of the
bell tower, whose height soared into the small patch of blue sky
visible from the cloister.

The "companion" Luna thought he was returning with one step to the
days of his childhood. Little children like the Gabriel of former days
were playing about the four galleries, and sitting in that part of the
cloister bathed by the first rays of the sun. Women, who reminded
of his mother, were shaking the bedclothes out over the garden, or
sweeping the red bricks opposite their dwellings; everything seemed
the same. Time had left it quite alone, evidently thinking there was
nothing there that he could possibly age. The "companion" could now
see two sketches of lay brothers that he had drawn with charcoal when
he was eight years old; had it not been for the children one might
have thought that life had been suspended in that corner of the
Cathedral, as though this aerial population could neither be born nor
die.

The "Wooden Staff," frowning and gloomy since the last words were
spoken, tried to give some explanation to his brother.

"I live in our same old ho