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These battlements are pierced with cusped circles, below them is a cornice ornamented with foliage. The buttresses of the aisles are decorated with gargoyles and crowned with pinnacles of a considerable size with crocketed spires and finials. The front of these pinnacles is ornamented with characteristic Perpendicular panelling.
And presently we came upon the works of this new building, and stepped out into mid-street to avoid the scaffoldings, and so pursued our way into the city's main square the Piazza del Commune, overshadowed by the red-and-white bulk of the Communal Palace. This was a noble building, rather in the Saracenic manner, borrowing a very warlike air from the pointed battlements that crowned it.
Those of the upper half are smaller and the masonry is in places careless and irregular. The red brick battlements are square. At short intervals there are walled-up gateways, round-headed or ogival in form, and the whole surface is rent and patched. Centuries of war and earthquakes, rain and fire, have given it a pleasant irregularity, the record of violent and troublous times.
The walls were too thick and solid for the battering-rams to make any serious impression upon them, and the garrison within were so numerous and so well armed, and they hurled down such a tremendous shower of darts, javelins, stones, and other missiles of every kind upon all who came near, that immense numbers of those who were brought up near the walls to work the engines were killed, while the besieged themselves, being protected by the battlements on the walls, were comparatively safe.
The side of the eminence next to me was made up of a succession of rocky, heavily-timbered steeps and shelves, that rose like battlements before me, while, about midway, it was pierced or notched down by a dark, wild, thicket-tangled gorge, which extended along back up the mountain, as far as the eye could penetrate beneath, or overlook above the tops of the overhanging trees.
He had now reached what was called the Lower Leads, a flat, covering a part of the prison contiguous to the gateway, and surrounded on all sides by walls about fourteen feet high. On the north stood the battlements of one of the towers of the gate. On this side a flight of wooden steps, protected by a hand-rail, led to a door opening upon the summit of the prison.
Owing to its walls and battlements being chiefly erected by nature, the Persian peasantry call it the Perii-Kasr, believing it to have been built by fairies. While descending the eastern slope, I surprise a gray lizard almost as large as a rabbit, basking in the sunbeams; he briskly scuttles off into the rocks upon being disturbed.
The heaven shone with a marvellous brilliancy the plain disappeared far in the haze the towers and battlements of the town rose black against the sky old outlandish trees rose up here and there clumps of camels were couched in the rare herbage dogs were baying about groups of men lay sleeping under their haicks round about round about the tall gates many lights were twinkling and they brought us water-pipes and sherbet- -and we wondered to think that London was only three weeks off.
At length, having left more than two-thirds of their brave companions behind them, the yeomanry attained the point, which, being commanded by arrows and engines from the battlements, might be considered as that of comparative safety.
Yes, the others had wished, there was no doubt about it, and they must have wished that they lived in a castle; for there the castle stood, black and stately, and very tall and broad, with battlements and lancet windows, and eight great towers; and, where the garden and the orchard had been, there were white things dotted like mushrooms.
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