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To the later work belong the set-off of the base, the coigns, the parapet, the east part of the south wall, the framing of most of the windows and doors, and the buttress and bell-cote at the west end. The west front is now divided by a large buttress of many stages terminating in a slope, but the plinth of this buttress is apparently original.
Between them was a shallow ditch. Platforms as much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling.
After another half-hour of stiff scrambling I sat down to rest awhile, leaving the men to spy the neighbourhood. Of course they had to find something, so this time they found a "serow" a somewhat scarce beast. I awaited the coming of the serow at various coigns of vantage where they said it was bound to pass, while the four men surrounded it from different directions.
There was a piano, with a deck-load of music, and more in a tender. There was a great plenty of pictures on the walls, on the shelves of the mantelpiece, and around generally; where coigns of vantage offered were statuettes, and quaint and pretty gimcracks, and rare and costly specimens of peculiarly devilish china.
He visited the poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took him each day from his home to his office.
He was consumed by a feverish desire to get the Inspector out of the room. They went down to the lower hall, the white-faced servants staring at them from coigns of vantage; and the Inspector glanced swiftly at the window and then at the hall. "That's where they got in," he said. "Nothing easier. There is no door, I suppose, between the Marquess's room and the window here?"
"No show of force, no gaud of office!" He rode unarmored, on his gray horse. The banner that was always borne with him "Yea, carry it still, until he demands it!" We were a bare dozen, but when we entered San Domingo one might think that Don Francisco de Bobadilla feared an army, for he had all his soldiers drawn up to greet us! The rest of the population were in coigns, gazing.
Get thee a breechpad. Manner of Oxenford. Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge. A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under portcullis barbs. They followed. Offend me still. Speak on. Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown.
There are quite a little budget of knotty points to settle between Hunter-Weston and d'Amade, so I made a careful note of them and went along to French Headquarters. By bad luck d'Amade was away, up in the front trenches, and I could not well deliver myself to des Coigns.
There is no relief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no signs of wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness and gracefulness of architecture. Perched upon their coigns of vantage, these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoese marauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on the watch.
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