The impression, however, hardly survives the moment when you cross the threshold and enter the church itself; for here you see an interior unlike any other great temple. The first impression is one of immense unencumbered spaciousness. The ordinary arrangement of nave and aisles does not exist, but from the floor there spring straight up to a height that seems prodigious six slender isolated marble pillars, three on each side. They form no continued arcade, although, of course, they are aligned, and each pillar is decorated lavishly in high relief with Renaissance ornamentation in panels, with canopied niches half-way up their height. From the top of each column spring a series of branches like the fronds of a palm-leaf, which, meeting in beautiful graceful curves, form the intricate series of bossed groins which compose the vaulted marble roof. At the west end of the church three low-pointed Manueline arches support the choir-loft, and along the north wall twelve Manueline doorways are ranged, with rich canopied niches above them, whilst the magnificent transept, with its gorgeous ceiling and royal chapels and tombs, and its vast Manueline chancel arch of twisted cables and cordage supporting rich canopied pulpits, altogether produce an effect of overpowering majesty. Here in the chancel repose, in splendid tombs, the ashes of the king, Manuel the Fortunate, and his son, John III., the two great builders of the fane; and here too lie, in a transept chapel, Vasco da Gama himself, and Camões, who enshrined in deathless epic the spirit of exalted enterprise of which the great explorer was the personification, and the Infante, Prince Henry, the prophetic inspirer. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses lie around in fretted sepulchres—that ill-used Catharine of Braganza, Queen-Consort of England, amongst them, here where she passed the long years of her widowhood—but their very names are for the most part forgotten now; and this memorable church of Belem, whilst its daring beauty stands, will remain the shrine of the two greatest figures of Portugal’s golden age, and of the “Fortunate Monarch,” Manuel, in whose reign the vision of the Infante was realised.