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Now also the unlucky blow he had made at Malchus at the gate of Gethsemane had to be paid for, because it greatly increased his chance of detection. He remained, therefore, just inside the great door, watching from the shadows of the archway what was going on inside, and, without knowing it, himself being watched by the portress from her coigne of vantage.
The taking of life being displeasing to Buddha, outside many of the temples old women and children earn a livelihood by selling sparrows, small eels, carp, and tortoises, which the worshipper sets free in honour of the deity, within whose territory cocks and hens and doves, tame and unharmed, perch on every jutty, frieze, buttress, and coigne of vantage.
The next morning the weather had almost completely cleared, and the view below us burst upon our eyes as we came out of the tent into the still air. The Parker Pass is the most splendid coigne of vantage on the whole mountain, except the summit itself.
And when, at last, our guides and servants, mounting to pinnacles and jutting points, and many a frieze and coigne of vantage, placed blue lights on them all, and at the word illuminated all together, there was redoubled bedlam in that abode of Hecate, and the eternal calm of the Boodh became awful.
The crater was about eight hundred yards in diameter and filled nearly to the brim with crystal water, which outflowed by a wide and well made channel into the lake, the supply being kept up by the in-flow from the azequia, whose course we could trace far into the mountains. The view from our coigne of vantage was unspeakably grand.
In fact, books flocked there as martlets did to Macbeth's castle; there was "no jutty frieze or coigne of vantage" but a book had made it his "pendent bed," and it appeared "his procreant cradle" too; for the children, in calling the great folios "papa-books" and "mamma-books," seemed instinctively to have hit upon the only way of accounting for the rapid increase and multiplication of volumes in that apartment.
It was to be further observed that the timbers had been stripped of their bark and the knots smoothed down so as to afford no coigne of vantage to even a naked foot. Add, again, that the poles had been charred and sharpened at the top, and it will be understood that the barrier was a formidable one against any assault short of artillery.
Then under the beetling crags, where the fern-trees began to feather up among the fallen boulders, the bushrangers turned like hunted wolves, and stood at bay. Then Desborough cried aloud to ride at them, and spare no man. And, as he spoke, every golden fernbough, and every coigne of vantage among the rocks, began to blaze and crackle with gun and pistol shot.
There are fathers and mothers who urge their daughters to make haste to occupy every coigne of vantage, and gradually advance into the heart of the enemy's country. I am not speaking now of those who are so vulgar as to intrigue for invitations, but simply of the ambitious who wish to accept an invitation given in good faith because it is a step upward in the social scale.
To Blatherwick, who had very little sympathy with gladness of any sort, the sight only called up by contrast the very different scene on which his eyes would look down the next evening from the vantage coigne of the pulpit, in a church filled with an eminently respectable congregation to which he would be setting forth the results of certain late geographical discoveries and local identifications, not knowing that already even later discoveries had rendered all he was about to say more than doubtful.
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