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Updated: May 15, 2025
Marvellously, and out of small means, the chisel had conveyed this impression; for the kneeling figure was mantled from head to foot, and had its face hidden in the folds of the drapery which skirted the bier, veiled, like the face of the tortured father in the old tragic tale.
"I beg you, gentlemen, who are not concerned, to retire," said the examining magistrate, when, after long banging and cracking, the door yielded to the axe and the chisel. "I ask this in the interests of the investigation. . . . Inspector, admit no one!" Tchubikov, his assistant, and the police superintendent opened the door and hesitatingly, one after the other, walked into the room.
A little to the right was an old monkish sun-dial; and through the green vista you caught the glimpse of one of those gray, grotesque statues with which the taste of Elizabeth's day shamed the classic chisel.
Some of the stones, of an oblong shape, are from ten to fifteen feet in length, and five or six feet thick. Their sides are quite smooth, but though square, and of pretty regular formation, they bear no mark of the chisel. They are laid together without cement, and here and there show gaps between. The topmost terrace and the lower one are somewhat peculiar in their construction.
Like the latter, too, the back was thick and strong, as I could tell by the "feel." I was gratified at perceiving this, for I knew that it would require a strong blade to hew a hole through the tough staves of oak. The instrument I held in my hands was the very thing for the purpose, almost as good as a chisel.
It consists of about a dozen blades 8 or 10 inches in length, fastened together side by side with string. The blades lie one overlapping the other like the slats of an American window shutter. Each projecting blade is sharpened to a chisel edge. The machine is grasped in the hand, as shown in fig. 6, and is slid up and down the shaft with a slight twisting movement obtained by bending the wrist.
All the mouldings, sculptures, and bass-reliefs seem to to have been executed after the walls and pillars were in their places; and everywhere the stones are fitted together in a manner so perfect that the joinings are not easy to find. There is neither mortar nor mark of the chisel; the surfaces are as smooth as polished marble.
Never has wood been cut with a more delicate chisel or a firmer hand. The variety of attitude and gesture which we so much admire in the Egyptian bas-relief is lacking to the statues. A mourner weeping, a woman bruising corn for bread, a baker rolling dough, are subjects as rare in the round as they are common in bas-relief.
A sharp axe, an adze, a shaving knife, a round edged adze, and a small auger, are principally necessary; and a cross-cut saw, broad-axe, sledge, and large sized chisel, will also be found useful. In any case the log should not be much less than two feet in diameter, perfectly sound, and free from knots.
The soil was formed of a micaceous, brilliant dust like ground sandstone, and here and there rose hummocks formed of the fragments of stone torn from the depths of the chain, which had been excavated by the persevering workmen of vanished generations, and the chisel of the Troglodyte labourers who had prepared in the shadow the eternal dwelling-places of the dead.
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