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Elevated to a height of perhaps two thousand feet, we beheld across the valley beneath us, hill above hill arise, all of them pyramidal, shaggy with forests of pine, beech, and oak, and interlaced one with another, so as to form the wildest yet most graceful combinations.
He went next to Cholulu, where, near the great mound, was an important city, in which they saw a “great plaza.” Bernal Diaz said of this city, “I well remember, when we first entered this town and looked up to the elevated white temples, how the whole place put us completely in mind of Valladolid.” The “white temples” were “elevated” because they stood on high pyramidal foundations, just as they are seen in the old ruins.
Its leaves are manufactured into mats and baskets. Its fruit is of a spherical form, from four to six inches in diameter, the surface being exactly divided by projections of a pointed, pyramidal shape. I have already described the bamboos. As we proceeded higher up we found ourselves among lofty fig-trees.
To escape from the subject he took her into the garden, her own pretty flower garden, divided by a wall covered with creepers from the larger plot of ground devoted to vegetables, and bounded on one side by buildings connected with his trade, and parted on the other from a well-stored timber-yard, by a beautiful rustic screen of fir and oak and birch with the bark on, which terminating in a graceful curve at the end next the house, and at that leading to the garden in a projecting gothic porch, partly covered by climbing plants, partly broken by tall pyramidal hollyhocks, and magnificent dahlias, and backed by a clump of tall elms, formed a most graceful veil to an unsightly object.
Within these walls are extensive terraces and pyramidal buildings, massive stone columns, idols, and altars covered with sculpture. The numerous terraces and pyramids are also walled with cut stone, and ornamented with carved heads of gigantic proportions, and colossal idols of solid stone from ten to fifteen feet in height.
From the propylon you pass into a peristyle court, about two hundred and thirty feet long by one hundred and seventy, the roof of which was once supported by double rows of columns, many of which now remain; and so on through other pyramidal gates and courts and porticoes and chambers which are, in all probability, of a more ancient date than the gates and obelisks and colossi first described, which last were perhaps added by Rameses, who commemorated his triumph by rendering a celebrated building still more famous.
The captives were halted before the pyramidal building, which, from its great size and peculiar appearance, I supposed to be the council house, or the dwelling of the chief. I afterwards learned that it was the temple, where they worship and sacrifice to the Sun-God; for, like all the southern Indians, descendants of the ancient Aztecs, the Camanches worship the sun and fire.
Croesus, after reflecting a moment, answered with a smile: "Those huge pyramidal masses of stone seem to me creations of the boundless desert, the gaily painted temple colonnades to be the children of the Spring; but though the sphinxes lead up to your temple gates, and seem to point the way into the very shrines themselves, the sloping fortress-like walls of the Pylons, those huge isolated portals, appear as if placed there to repel entrance.
In the west wall the window in the second stage has no mullion, the innermost buttress is of the same type as its next neighbour, and the parapet is returned over all the buttresses, thus forming three 'turrets, of which that nearest to the nave rests partially on a large corbel. The staircase at the south-west corner terminates at the top in a square turret with a pyramidal stone cap.
As in the Whistler portrait, the keystone was the picture on the wall, in this composition the group of mounted guardsmen on the left gives a circle’s unity to it, helps to join the middle distance with the foreground, becomes the third point in the triangle, which gives pyramidal solidity to the composition and is altogether quite as important to the picture as the right wing to an army.
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