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Updated: June 15, 2025
They had journeyed thus for an evening and a long day, with but the needful pauses for rest and refreshment, when they saw before them in the distance, embowered in delicious gardens of palms and cypresses and rich masses of bloom, the domes and minarets of the city of Nikosia slender and white and lace-like against the deep blue sky and climbing the hillside, high above the city, the turrets and crenellated walls of its far-famed citadel.
The topmost arcade of the three rises over another string course and is round-headed like the rest. Its arches do not, however, like theirs, run on continuously but form two groups of two on each side. The crenellated gable parapet rises from a string course with five sculptured masks, and has plain shields on its battlements.
The walls are crenellated, usually without machicolations, pierced with long slots, and with square holes through which beams were thrust, supporting wooden balconies which commanded the bases of the walls, and enabled the besieged to protect themselves against the efforts made by the assailants to sap the bases of the ramparts, or to escalade the walls.
Two boys staggering under loads of firewood did not escape so easily, but were detained and a log squeezed from each wherewith to light the likin fires. A plain everywhere irrigated, flanked by treeless hills; fields shut in by low embankments; villages in plantations round its margin; black-faced sheep in flocks on the hillsides; and, away to the right the crenellated walls of Tengyueh.
The fact is that the great majority of the crenellated buildings in the reliefs have triangular battlements, while the theory that they are merely a hasty way of representing the stepped crenellations is to some extent discredited by their frequent occurrence side by side with the latter on the same relief.
And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts till the pageant should be over. "Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?" "Yes," she said. "Quite wonderful."
These bore marks of antiquity, and were doubtless as the gallant knight had left them. Curiously, too, there were remains of an outhouse with a crenellated parapet, suggestive enough of a castle. From Quesada we rode to Argamasilla del Alba, where Cervantes was imprisoned, and where the First Part of Don Quixote was written.
If we give rein to our imagination and allow it for a moment to restore their crenellated parapets to the ramps and terraces; if we set up the resting-places, rebuild the chapels and pavilions and replace the statues; if we cover the sanctuary with its vesture of bronze and gold, and the whole edifice with the surface decoration to which the sun of Mesopotamia gave its fullest value, we shall then understand how far superior, as an architectonic conception, the Chaldæan zigguratt was to the Egyptian pyramid.
Nestling between two mountains which seemed to hug the water was a village with a remarkable wall stretching from one peak to the other, and curving down, thus encircling the town; this wall had a crenellated edge and was perfectly preserved. The mountain range continued for some time, and then was succeeded by the more prevailing flat shore, which soon merged again into mountains.
Often before breakfast I climbed to the top of the wall beyond the Water Gate for a run with Jack before the heat of the day set in. It was a glorious place for a morning walk. The wall is some forty feet high, and along the top runs a broad path enclosed by crenellated parapets.
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