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Updated: May 26, 2025
Bélogorsk lay about thirty miles beyond Orenburg, on the frontier of the Kirghiz Kaisak Steppes, and it was to this outlandish place I was banished. I expected to see high bastions, a wall and a ditch, but there was nothing at Bélogorsk but a little village, surrounded by a wooden palisade.
To four of the five bastions, the Captain-General, with characteristic ostentation, gave his own names and titles. One was called the Duke, the second Ferdinando, a third Toledo, a fourth Alva, while the fifth was baptized with the name of the ill-fated engineer, Pacheco.
To which I replied in these very words: "All the Count's servants are so much obliged to you, monsieur, that they ought to bear everything from you; but were it not for this consideration alone, I should think that your bastions would not be always strong enough to protect you."
In the meantime, the trenches of the allies had been drawn so near the Russian works that there was a fair prospect of carrying the bastions by another assault. A terrible bombardment was begun on the fifth, and continued to the eighth of September, when both the Redan and the Malakhoff were taken by storm. But the struggle was desperate, and the losses on both sides immense.
Now but here Barbara's quiet observation suddenly ended; the air was shaken by the roar of cannon from the bastions of the citadel, and the signals of the warders' horns blended with the thunder of the artillery. At the same time the banners and streamers on every flagpole, stirred by a light breeze from the east, began to wave in the sunny August air.
From the city of Brunn, the capital of Moravia, their wan looks sought the mountain prison above, where frowned the bastions of Spielberg, once a mediaeval castle, then a fortress, built by the Emperor Charles, and, just before the battle of Austerlitz, dismantled by Napoleon, and now the place of confinement for the most degraded criminals of Austria, nearly a thousand of whom there expiate their offences.
The Bay Town is hidden away in a most astonishing fashion, for, until you have almost reached the two bastions which guard the way up from the beach, there is nothing to be seen of the charming old place.
On a subsequent visit to the town in spring time, my wife and I took a twilight walk, just after our arrival, through its gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza, where the impendent houses lowered like bastions, and all the masses of their mighty architecture stood revealed in shadow and dim lamplight.
That day seemed as if it never would end. Sercq and Brecqhou lay basking in the sun, as though no tragedies lurked behind their rounded bastions. The sun seemed fixed in the sky. The shadows wheeled so slowly that only by noting them against the seams in the rocks could I be sure that they moved at all.
No landscape in Europe is more wonderful than this thrice wonderful in the vastness of its arching heavens, in the stillness of its level plain, and in the bulwark of huge crested mountains, reared afar like bastions against the northern sky. The little town is all alive in this September weather.
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