Chapter 24

I cannot say a word to you on any other subject, till you have taken a turn with me in the shrubberies and gardens of the glorious (so they call it) hermitage of _St. Ana_. Coming from _St. Benito_, by a brook which runs down the middle of the mountain, six hundred paces distant from it, stands _St. Ana_, in a spacious situation, and much larger than any other, and is nearly in the center of them all. The chapel here is sufficiently large for the whole society to meet in, and accordingly they do so on certain festivals and holidays, where they confess to their mountain vicar, and receive the sacrament, This habitation is nobly adorned with large trees; the ever-green oak, the cork, the cypress, the spreading fig-tree, and a variety of others; yet it is nevertheless dreadfully exposed to the fury of some particular winds; and the buildings are sometimes greatly damaged, and the life of the inhabitant endangered, by the boughs which are torn off and blown about his dwelling. The foot-road from it to the monastery is only one thousand three hundred paces, but it is very rugged and unsafe; the mule-road is above four times as far: it was built in 1498, and is the hermitage where all the pilgrims pay their ordinary devotion.

Eight hundred and fifty paces distant, on the road which leads to the hermitage of _St. Salvador_, stands, in a solitary and deep wood, the hermitage of the _Holy Trinity_. Every part of the building is neat, and the simplicity of the whole prepares you to expect the same simplicity of manners from the man who dwells within it: and a venerable man he is; but he seemed more disposed to converse with his neighbours, _Messrs. Nature_, than with us. His trees, he knows, never flatter or affront him; and after welcoming us more by his humble looks than civil words, he retired to his long and shady walk; a walk, a full gun-shot in length, and nothing in nature certainly can be more beautiful; it forms a close arbour, though composed of large trees, and terminates in a view of a vast range of pines, which are so regularly placed side by side, and which, by the reflection of the sun on their yellow and well burnished sides, have the appearance of the pipes of an organ a mile in circumference. The Spaniards say that the mountain is a block of coarse jasper, and these _organ pipes_, it must be confessed, seem to confirm it; for they are so well polished by the hand of time, that were it not too great a work for man, one would be apt to believe they had been cut by an artist.

Five hundred and sixty paces from the hermitage of the Holy Trinity, stands _St. Cruz_; it is built under the foot of one of the smaller pines; this is the nearest cell of any to the convent, and consequently oftenest visited, being only six hundred and sixty steps from the bottom of the mountain.