We entered the Cathedral by the north door, after admiring the toral archivolt and triple columns of the door leading to the Capilla de San Juan, with its statues of St. Peter and St. Paul. The first sight that attracted our attention was the handsome sarcophagus, covered with stone relief, of Bishop Vasco Perez Marino, who, according to one account, brought the crucifix, which Orense counts as one of her greatest treasures, from Cape Finisterre, somewhere between 1333 and 1343. The crucifix itself, we found in a chapel on the opposite side of the transept nave. Villa-Amil says this could hardly be the Finisterre Christ, because there exists documentary evidence that during the sixteenth century both the Christs were objects of adoration at the same time. Molina describes them both, and says that the Christ at Orense is one of those that were made by Nicodemus. (There are two others in Spain, one at Burgos and another at Arenas.) Bishop Juan Muñoz de la Cueva wrote of this crucifix in 1727 that the sight of it filled the hardest of sinners with confusion and contrition, and attracted the devotion even of foreign kings and pilgrims. Its hair, which is black and long, and its nails, are said to be human. I remember seeing the Christ at Burgos laid out on the pavement in the nave of the Cathedral on Good Friday that the faithful might kneel before it and kiss its feet, and I was informed at the time that it was covered with human skin. The figure of Christ in both cases is life-size. Villa-Amil believes that the Christ at Orense is of a later date by two centuries than Bishop Marino, and he adds that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the worship of crucifixes was particularly fervid. The Popes granted special Indulgences to pilgrims who visited the Orense Christ, and as Orense was a halting-place for pilgrims to St. James, it was visited by most of the foreigners who came on that pilgrimage. The Christ is made of wood, and tightly covered by several layers of flesh-coloured cloth, which looks like human skin; the feet and arms are so constructed as to be easily moved. Pilgrims stick their fingers into the body, and are amazed to find that an impression is made just as would be the case with a human body. Señor Benito F. Alonso, who is a native of Orense, has carefully examined this Christ, and gives his readers a practical explanation of all that for so long appeared so miraculous with regard to it.[273] We next visited the cloister next to the _Sala Capitular_, and here our attention was drawn to some very quaint sculpture upon the old capitals: on one of them was the figure of a horse, and on others there were Biblical groups which must be among the earliest work in the Cathedral.