Street could not speak too highly of the beauties of this façade. He wrote: “The detail of the front is of great interest, inasmuch as it is clearly by another and an earlier workman than that of the western porch. There are three shafts in each jamb of the doors, whereof the outer are of marble, the rest of stone. These marble shafts are carved with extreme delicacy, with a series of figures in niches, the niches having round arches, which rest upon columns separating the figures. The work is so characteristic as to deserve illustration. It is executed almost everywhere with that admirable delicacy so conspicuous in early Romanesque sculpture. The other shafts are twisted in very bold fashion.... Figures on either side support the ends of the lintels of the doors, but the tympana and the wall above for some feet are covered with pieces of sculpture evidently taken down and refixed where they are now seen. They are arranged, in short, like the casts of the Crystal Palace, as if the wall were part of a museum. One of the stones of the tympanum of the eastern door has the ‘Crowning with Thorns’ and the ‘Scourging,’ and on the other stones above are portions of a ‘Descent into Hades,’ in which asses with wings are kneeling to our Lord. Asses and other beasts are carved elsewhere, and altogether the work has a rude barbaric splendour characteristic of its age.” Street was also much struck with the windows above the double entrance of this façade, and he wrote: “Their shafts and archivolts are richly twisted and carved, and the cusping of the inner arch is of a rare kind. It consists of five complete foils, so that the points of the lower cusp rest on the capital, and, to a certain extent, _the effect of a horseshoe arch is produced_. This might be hastily assumed to be a feature borrowed from the Moors; but the curious fact is that this very rare form of cusping is seen in many, if not most, of the churches of the Auvergnal type ... and it must be regarded here, therefore, as another proof of the foreign origin of most of the work of Santiago rather than of any Moorish influence.” This allusion to the horseshoe arch is of particular interest in connection with the remarks we have already made upon that form of architecture in a previous chapter. Fernandez Casanova and Lopez Ferreiro would describe the form of the arches of this façade as Byzantine, and argue that such a form has existed in Spain since the sixth century. The statues of this façade--the birds, the flowers, and the beasts--are all part of a mystic and profound symbolism. Ferreiro calls them a compendium in stone of Divine Revelation,[138] remarking that they offer sufficient material to fill a book; he then quotes a different text of Scripture to explain each figure. In the space between the figures of Christ and St. James are sculptured vertically the letters-- ANF REX meaning King Alfonso VI., in whose reign this portico was constructed.