Though the outside of the palace is Portuguese Manueline, the interior exhibits at every step portions of the original Moorish edifice unaltered. The vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from the time of the Arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure Moorish, lined with beautiful Arab tiles. Arab tiles, indeed, remain in many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is exquisitely paved with them. There is a beautiful little Moorish _patio_ too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a palace at Fez or Mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. The older rooms of the palace generally are dark, for the Moorish architects shut out the sun wherever possible, and the up and down floors on all sorts of queer levels impress upon one the immense antiquity of the place as a dwelling-house.
The finest rooms are the hall of magpies, the hall of swans, and the hall of stags. The first-named is a square apartment with beautiful Moorish tiles, and a coved ceiling covered with paintings of magpies, each one with a motto issuing from its mouth saying, _Por Bem_, “with good intent.” The legend told is that Queen Philippa one day surprised John the Great, who was a gallant lover, kissing a maid of honour and offering her a rose. The Plantagenet queen had a temper of her own, which John probably feared more than the Castilian charge up the slope of Aljubarrota, and the king in exculpation cried to his wife, “Por Bem”; as who should say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_. The reputation of John was such that his excuse passed from mouth to mouth derisively, the queen’s sycophantic maids repeating it with such significant emphasis, and so frequently, that the king to shame them adopted “Por Bem” as his motto, and had his reception hall at Cintra painted with the chattering birds repeating it.
[Illustration: MANUELINE WINDOWS IN THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA]
Another fine Moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in the _patio_ below, and given to King Manuel by his brother-in-law, Charles V., as a very great rarity. Another large apartment, with a conical roof, was constructed by King Manuel himself, who gave to it the name of the hall of stags. Here the king collected the armorial achievements of all the Portuguese nobility. Seventy-four stags are ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of Tavora, which the great minister Pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—