No
doubt it is because the crypt is of this century, while the other two
churches are of the thirteenth.
There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after dining at the
little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part of the town except
the churches, is remarkably clean, my companion set out to climb up to
the castle, and I wandered back to the great church. As I sat idly
on the steps a monk accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the
convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down
long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until
I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he
suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings
and led me to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the glory, the wonder of
the sight! We were halfway down the mountain-side, hanging between the
blue heaven and the billowy Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its
azure fusing into tints of dreamy softness as they vanished in the
deep violet shadows of thick-crowding mountains, on whose surfaces
and gorges lay changing colors of the superbest intensity. Poplars and
willows showed silvery among the tender green of other deciduous trees
in their fresh spring foliage and the deep velvet of the immortal
cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, which looked like little puffs
of pink and white cloud resting on the bosom of the valley. A small,
clear mountain-stream wound round the headland to join the Tiber,
which divides the landscape with its bare, pebbly bed.
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