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It is ascended by an inclined platform without steps, which is very convenient; and on arriving at the summit the most magnificent panorama is spread out before you, Venice with its innumerable islands covered with palaces, churches, and buildings, and extending at a distance into the sea; also the immense dike, sixty feet broad, several fathoms deep, and built of great blocks of stone, which enormous work surrounds Venice and all its islands, and defends it against the rising of the sea.
"Gemini! what is that now?" quoth Tip again, as we distinctly heard the commixed rumbling and rattling sound of artillery scampering along the dike. "The ship has sent up these rockets to warn us of our danger," said Mr Treenail. "What is to be done? Ah, Splinter, we are in a scrape there they have brought up field pieces, don't you hear?" Splinter had heard it as well as his junior officer.
A country so small that they build dikes to keep the inhabitants from being spilt off the edge, is hardly the place for a scandal certainly not in stolid Dordrecht or in that fly-speck of a Papendrecht, whose dormer windows peer over the edge of the dike as if in mortal fear of another inundation.
Above the natural dam made by this dike the valley was bedded up with sand and large gravel washed down by the torrential rush of spring freshets. Below it the same wild floods, leaping down in a twenty-foot fall, had gouged out a pothole so wide and deep that it was never empty of water even in the driest seasons.
"I've been away over there on the dike to see if I could get permission to cross, but I didn't succeed." "Oh, conductor!" remonstrated Louise Donner. "And we don't get to Medicine Bend to-night," said Doctor Lanning. "What we need is a man of influence," suggested Harrison. "We ought never to have let your 'pa' go," he added, turning to Gertrude Brock, beside whom he sat.
The old man's eyes flamed wildly, and crying, "J'ne veux pas! j'ne veux pas!" he broke from them and struggled back toward the dike. Instantly his son overtook him, picked him up in his arms, and carried him, now sobbing feebly, down to the boat, where he laid him on a pile of blankets. As the laden craft moved slowly toward the ship the old man's complainings ceased.
It soon appeared that our anticipations of good sport were not to be disappointed: on all sides, as far as the eye could reach, as well as near at hand in the pools at the base of the gisr or dike, appeared innumerable birds, principally aquatic.
"Who's Chauncey Dike?" I asked. "He reckons he's a buck," was all that Polly Ann vouchsafed. Chauncey drew near with a strut. He had very long black hair, a new coonskin cap with a long tassel, and a new blue-fringed hunting shirt. What first caught my eye was a couple of withered Indian scalps that hung by their long locks from his girdle. Chauncey Dike was certainly handsome.
Just at the head of this open place the river runs across a dike; that is, a fissure in the rocks, open to depths below, was filled with eruptive matter, and this on cooling was harder than the rocks through which the crevice was made, and when these were washed away the harder volcanic matter remained as a wall, and the river has cut a gateway through it several hundred feet high and as many wide.
Safe behind the pools of Lieberose, Friedrich between them and Berlin, lie those dear Russians; extending, Daun and they, like an impassable military dike, with spurs of Outposts and cunningly devised Detachments, far and wide, from beyond Bober or utmost Crossen on the east, to Hoyerswerda in Elbe Country on the west; dike of eighty miles long, and in some eastern parts of almost eighty broad; so elaborate is Daun's detaching quality, in cases of moment.
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