The crypt of the Church of the Monastery is sepulchral and gloomy. Instead of a staircase a long passage descends with a gentle slope from the west end of the church above, and leads to the underground chapel, the reason assigned to this method of entrance being that it allowed of elaborate processions passing from the ancient to the modern building with effective decorum. At the end of this long passage there is a spherically vaulted gallery with seven smaller chapels radiating from it. A massive altar of great antiquity stands in the middle of the centre chapel. Entirely free from all rich decoration, the whole place reeks of the dark ages, a fitting symbol of a period when art was struggling towards a new expression. [Illustration: THE MONASTERY. MONTMAJOUR] The crypt was probably built in the ninth or tenth century, and rebuilt by the Abbé Rambart towards the end of the eleventh. The church above was started by the same abbot, but was never finished according to the original plan, for the west front is a hurried piece of construction evidently intended to serve until some future date when the Abbey banking account should be in a sufficiently flourishing state to give an imposing finish to the building. The tower of the Monastery, which gives it the appearance of a fortress, was built in the middle of the fourteenth century, and possesses all the characteristics of the most advanced military architecture of the period. Its walls are built of smaller blocks of stone than is usual in similar buildings of that time. The great hall on the ground floor was used by the inhabitants of the Monastery as a storehouse, containing also a cistern into which the water was collected from the roofs, the overflow finding its way into exterior reservoirs. The most modern part of the Monastery is to-day in the hands of private owners, but in such a dilapidated condition that it is almost unsafe to venture among its tottering walls. These buildings, erected during a period of the institution’s greatest prosperity, suffered more at the Revolution than the older parts of the Abbey. If the florid eighteenth-century buildings were all removed, they would be little loss to the place from an architectural point of view, for their features strike a discordant note among the simple early Gothic surroundings. The cloisters of Montmajour are not very unlike those of St. Trophimus at Arles, and if the pillars and capitals of the arcade are less interesting in detail than those of the more famous cloisters, they have a more pleasing and less confusing effect in the mass. Round the walls there are several very beautiful tombs with a variety of early styles of arched canopies--pointed, round, and inflected.