II
The Genuine Village Of Escorial Lies Mostly To The Left Of The Station,
But The Artificial Town Which Grew
Up with the palace is to the right.
Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which
Were and
are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the road to the palace
takes you far from the slag, with a much-hoteled and garden-walled
dignity, to the plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the
massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng of American
women wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back to
their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the
place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had
constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the
measureless courts and endless corridors.
At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the
gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one
shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the
circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the
advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have
passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace,
where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly,
as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining
with gold and polished marble.
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