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On Saturday, the 12th, a crack was observed spreading upward in a sloping direction from the cut above the roof of the Loggetta toward the northeast angle of the shaft, then crossing the angle and running up almost perpendicularly in the line of the little windows that gave light to the internal passage from the base to the bell-chamber.
I suppose we shall have rain, and we want it. I could thump that old castle among the trees into smash, and your church looks as if I could put a shot with a rifle-gun into the bell-chamber." "And so you could. What I want to show you is that very point, and the importance of it. With a battery of long twenty-fours up here, the landing, the bay, and all the roads are at our mercy.
As a precautionary measure the music in the Piazza was suspended on Saturday evening. On Sunday orders were issued to endeavor to bind the threatened angle. Dust began to pour out of the widening crack, and bricks to fall. A block of Istrian stone crashed down from the bell-chamber, then a column from the same site.
The upper stage of the lantern, above the roof as seen from within, was once a bell-chamber; its lights are not, and never have been, glazed. The whole of the lantern is of wood, covered with lead. Two flying buttresses rise from the corners of the nave and transept aisles to the corbel table of the clerestory range.
Upon these gigantic stone gratings, if I may be allowed the expression, the interior wall of the tower rests, and they also carry the entire weight of the bell-chamber and bells. The whole space is now completely open from the floor of the Cathedral to the wooden floor of the bell-chamber, which is painted underneath in blue and gold. From this floor hangs, the handsome corona of wrought iron.
Sir George's decision that the bells might safely be rung lifted the responsibility from the young man's shoulders, but not the anxiety from his mind. He never left the church while the peal was ringing. First he was in the bell-chamber steadying himself by the beams of the cage, while he marked the wide-mouthed bells now open heavenwards, now turn back with a rush into the darkness below.
The campanile must have been built by Poppo, although the base looks like Roman masonry, since the mosaics go right under it, but it was added to later, and the octagonal bell-chamber is inscribed: "MD · XLVIII TADEVS · LVRANVS · HOC · O · FECIT." It is 39 ft. square and the walls are over 7 ft. thick. The entrance is approached by 27 steps. It is 70 ft. to the floor of the bell-chamber.
The Campanile was finished, as far as the bell-chamber at least, in 1148, under the Doge Domenico Moresini, whose sarcophagus and bust surmount the portal of the San Nicoll del Lido.
He gained the next, and the next; he was twenty feet above the floor of the bell-chamber. The boom of the bell was deafening. He paused for breath, and then hurried on his upward way, slipping sometimes, but never falling. Suddenly the bell stopped; a deep hum of sound spun and echoed in the narrowing cone where Windybank was giddily clinging. He had paused again to recover breath and stability.
Looking down, he saw a head rising from the tower steps into the bell-chamber; the sexton had come up to readjust the rope. The fugitive's guilty conscience put another meaning upon his act; he felt sure that signs of his presence had been noted, and that the fellow had come up to search for him. A little way above him was darkness and security.
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