After visiting the church we went down into the Pantheon. This is the name given to the vault where the bodies of the kings of Spain are preserved. It is octagonal in form, thirty-six feet in diameter and thirty-eight feet in height, directly under the high altar; so that when the priest is saying mass, his feet are on the stone which forms the keystone of the vault. The staircase leading into it is formed of granite and coloured marble, and closed by a handsome bronze gate. The pantheon is lined throughout with jasper, porphyry, and other stones no less precious. In the walls there are niches with antique-formed _cippi_, destined to contain the bodies of those kings and queens who have left issue. A penetrating and death-like coldness reigns throughout the vault, and the polished marble glitters and sparkles in the flickering torchlight; it seems as if the walls were dripping with water, and the visitor might almost imagine himself to be in some submarine grotto. The monstrous edifice weighs you down with all its weight; it surrounds, it embraces, it suffocates you; you feel as if you were clasped by the tentacles of an immense granite polypus. The dead bodies contained in the sepulchral urns seem more dead than any others, and it is with difficulty that you can induce yourself to believe that they can ever possibly be resuscitated. In the vault, as in the church, the impression is one of sinister despair; in all this dreary place there is not one hole through which you can see the sky.