On my way back, I went over the same plain, which stretches out to great length and is eight miles wide, to see the place where the people of Viterbo (who are all either workers or traffickers with no gentlemen amongst them) collect the flax and hemp, the working of which is their chief industry, and found none but men employed, the women taking no part in the work. There was a vast quantity of material, and many craftsmen busy around a lake of water, which is boiling hot all the year round, and is said to be fathomless. From this lake they have formed other pools of warm water in which they put their hemp and flax to steep.[102] On Saturday, Saint Michael’s Day, I went after dinner to visit the Madonna del Cerquio,[103] a church about a mile outside the city. The road thither is a very fine one, level and straight and planted with trees from one end to the other, the work of the Farnese Pope.[104] The church itself is very fine, full of evidences of devotion and innumerable _ex votos_. On the wall is the Latin inscription, some hundred years old, telling how a certain man, having been attacked by robbers and half-killed, sought refuge in an oak tree, upon which was set the image of the Madonna now preserved here, and offered his prayers thereto. By a miracle the Madonna made him invisible, and thus he escaped a most pressing danger; and from this miracle arose this particular worship of the Madonna. The present magnificent church was built near where the oak stood, and the trunk of the oak tree, cut off low down, may yet be seen; and the part to which the image was fixed, together with the branches, is hung up on the wall.