We were now come into the great square, where they were forming the procession, and I had as much opportunity as I desired for noting the changes three years had made. And yet I cared not to look at the cathedral, nor at the rich mansions that bordered the other two sides of the square, but only at the sky and the trees, whereof I had seen none for so long a time. The place was very full of people, for the Archbishop is at extraordinary pains to make the festival known beforehand even in the remotest parishes of the province, so that countless numbers of the lower sort do journey to the city from all parts for to behold the sight. The balconies all round were decked with flags and carpets, and crowded full with ladies, habited in stuffs of many colours, very rich and fine, and wearing an extraordinary great quantity of diamonds and other jewels, their _cavalieros_[75] standing behind their chairs. So new and strange to me after my long silence and loneliness was the noise and turmoil of the press, that I was fain to shrink back into the doorway of the Holy House until I was called for with my godfather to take my place in the procession. And this was ordered as follows. First come the Dominicans, in their garb of black and white, bearing with them their great banner, the which has a portrait of Saint Dominic their founder, holding in his two hands a sword and a branch of olive, and the words underneath, _Justitia et Misericordia_. Then come the prisoners, each one led by his godfather (that is, as I have said, a gentleman of some one of the first families of Goa), the least guilty being placed first, and the rear brought up by those condemned to the flames, among whom was I. Behind come their lordships the Inquisidors, and the lesser officers of the Holy House. And these being all marshalled in their order, the procession set forth, the religious in the front chanting slowly that Latin hymn beginning _Vexilla Regis prodeunt_,[76] passing through all the chief streets of the city. I have said that I was barefooted, as was also the other prisoners, and we found that the streets was paved with a kind of small, sharp flints, the which caused us a prodigious pain and annoyance, while everywhere the people of the lower sort, that thronged the ways, laughed and jeered at us as we limped over the stones with our bleeding feet.