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On one side the river is the high, bare rock of La Baume; on the other, a higher rock where houses, supporting each other by outstretched buttresses, seem to cling to the sheer hillside as shrubs in mountain crevasses, and are dominated and protected by a large and formidable fortress-castle that crowns the very top of the peak.
But the other members of his family were actuated by a like ambition, and when he died from the effects of an accident, in 1494, he was actually besieged in Akhsí, a fortress-castle which he had made his capital. His eldest son, Bábar, then just twelve years old, was at the time at Andijan, thirty-six miles from Akhsí. The enemy was advancing on Andijan.
The fortress-castle of Oscarburg, on the lonely wooded shore of Viborg Bay, had kept many a secret safely before now, and it would keep this one. Every retainer in the Castle, every man, woman, and child on the estates for leagues around, was his, body and soul, as their fathers before them had been the blind, unquestioning serfs of his fathers. There his word was law, and his will was fate.
Here appear traces of vegetation some low trees and bushes, a view of the forest inward into the country, a few buildings outside the walls, a railway-station, a cemetery, an aqueduct, a small sluggish stream, marshes and stagnant pools. In front of the city, built upon the coral reef, stands the celebrated fortress-castle of San Juan de Ulloa.
In its glorious days of feudal youth its fortress-castle was invincible. The walls were so thick that in days before gunpowder no assaults could hope to break through them. Down in its underground depths was a dungeon, where trapped enemy princes lay rotting and starving through weary years, never released save by death, unless tortured into signing shameful treaties.
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