Many-mooded death. Death of the senses, death of the mind, death of glory, death of the will to live. From his imperial splendor and from the ranges of his kingly sway Philip steps forth an ascetic. He will have his Solution within the ken of his eye--this master upon whose realm the sun does not set. He is the lord of the earth; and lives with one last mastering desire: to build a tomb for his glory. Philip searches the waste fastness of Castile, until he finds his site: this barren spur of the Sierra below whose rock spreads the desert. Now he calls his slaves--they are the painters and the architects. Juan Bautista de Toledo and his successor Juan de Herrera, builders of the Escorial, are tools in the fever-cold hand of the king. Their plans are studied, revised, rejected. Their ebullient moods are flayed, their dignity is slurred. They are slaves--mere cutters of stone--they are tools. And so, in a land of bastard architectures, where the Gothic is deformed, where Renaissance and baroque and Oriental forms are puddled and hypertrophied and belied, rises this masterwork. In its brutal chastity, speaks the tragic spirit of him who made it. The Escorial is to unverdant, fanatically ordered Spain what the green tragedies of Racine are to open, sweetly measured France.[16] * * * * * Across the valley on a wooded height is a rocky bench known as the Seat of the King. Here Philip comes each day and watches the Escorial grow before him. He fears he might die ere it is done. He drives his slaves the artists; imports whole corps of them from Italy and Flanders. And when he is stricken with the illness which he thought his last, he is carried in a litter from Madrid, eight dolorous days upon the bleak meseta. He seeks the bare cell that is his Palace in the Escorial basement; he lies in the bedroom built beside the Altar so that he may hear Mass from his pillows. And so indeed he died. But still he sits each afternoon upon the _Silla del Rey_, and watches. Below him, the sun goes down and a cold moon rises. Below him a patch of lawn and a flume float within this world splintered of granite and twilight. A wood of encina stands like an army of cowled saints. They are gnarled, gray-armored in moss, and their leaves are little refulgences of prayer, holding the sunset above the sodden ground. They look up, as Philip looks, toward the Escorial. It is matriced in jagged rock; it is sheer from the sun and the moon light.... _CHAPTER VI_ _THE DREAM OF VALENCIA_