In one of the corridors is placed a white marble Christ the size of life, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and some very singular fantastic paintings in the style of the Temptations of Callot and Teniers, only much older. In other respects it is impossible to conceive anything more monotonous than these narrow, low, and interminable corridors of grey granite, which circulate all through the edifice like the veins in the human body; you must really be blind to find your way about them; you go up stairs and down stairs, you make a thousand twistings and turnings, and if you only walked about three or four hours you would wear out the soles of your shoes, for the granite is as rough as a file, and as harsh as so much sand-paper. From the dome you perceive that the balls which, when viewed from below, did not appear larger than horses' bells, are of an enormous size, and might serve as monster globes. An immense panorama unfolds itself at your feet, and you perceive at one glance the hilly country which separates you from Madrid; on the other side you behold the mountains of Guadarrama. From this position, too, you see the whole plan of the building; your eye plunges into the courtyards and cloisters, with their rows of superposed arcades, and their fountain or central pavilion; the roofs appear like so many simple ridges, just as they would in an engraving that gave a bird's-eye view of the place. When we ascended to the dome, a stork with three little ones was perched in a large straw nest, that resembled a turban turned upside down, placed on the top of one of the chimneys. This interesting family presented the strangest appearance in the world; the mother was standing on one leg in the middle of the nest, with her neck stuck between her shoulders, and her beak reposing majestically upon her breast, like a philosopher in meditation; the little birds were stretching out their long beaks and their long necks to ask for food. I hoped to witness one of those sentimental scenes of natural history, where we see the large white pelican wounding her own breast to nourish her offspring; but the stork appeared to be very little moved by these demonstrations of hunger, and did not move more than the stork engraved on wood which adorns the frontispiece of the books coloured by Cramoisi. This melancholy group increased still more the profound solitude of the place, and imparted a kind of Egyptian character to this Pharaoh-like assemblage of buildings. After descending from the dome, we visited the garden, where there is more architecture than vegetation. It consists of a succession of large terraces and parterres of clipped boxwood, representing a series of designs similar to the patterns of old damask silk, with a few fountains, and pieces of greenish water; it is a wearisome, solemn garden, as formal as a _Golilla_, and altogether worthy of the morose-looking edifice to which it is attached.