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Updated: June 3, 2025
It seemed to us that we had never been in a place where there are so many points of vantage to look down from. The plat- forms, the bastions, the terraces, the high-perched windows and balconies, the hanging gardens and dizzy crenellations, of this complicated structure, keep you in perpetual intercourse with an immense horizon.
These were finished at the top with open crenellations in brick, along the base of which ran apparently a frieze of painted rosettes. It is a bird's-eye view in perspective of the south-western part of the palace. The vertical sections on the right of the engraving show how the stones were bonded to the crude brick. The crenellations are omitted here, but they may be seen in place on the left.
At length the moon rose, and toward midnight Odo, spurring out of a dark glen, found himself at the opening of the valley of Donnaz. A cold radiance bathed the familiar pastures, the houses of the village along the stream, and the turrets and crenellations of the castle at the head of the gorge.
The wind whistled now and then through the cracks of the convent windows and over the crenellations of the old walls, as Death's scythe might whistle if he were mowing down men with a right good will, heaps upon heaps of slain. The old bell struck the hour, sullenly, with a dead thud in the air after each stroke, as a bell tolls for a burial.
The Assyrians seem to have been so pleased with these crenellations that they placed them upon such small things as steles and altars. We are thus brought to the subject of altars. These are sufficiently varied in form. On the other hand, the die or dado below them is fluted. It is triangular on plan.
Strangely wild and mournful, it rose and fell, and gained at times in force as it seemed to echo from the right side of the canon, which here rose up like some gigantic wall hundreds of feet in height, barred with what appeared to be terraces, and honeycombed with open doors and windows, row above row, from the lowest, upon which in two places smouldered the remains of fires, right up to the sky-line, which, roughly regular, was carved into something resembling the crenellations of a gigantic castle, extending apparently hundreds upon hundreds of yards.
Its crenellations and turrets are military and forceful, not ornate. For the church had its defensive as truly as its religious purpose, and formerly was united on the North with the fortifications of the Palace, and contributed to the protection of its prelates as well as to their arch-episcopal prestige.
The way in which the sculptor has endeavoured to suggest the crenellations shows that these plans are not drawn on the same principal as ours; there is no section taken at the junction with the soil or at a determined height; the draughtsman in all probability wished to give an idea of the height of the flanking towers.
He makes it cut the upper angles of each of the superimposed rectangles, as we have done in our Figs. 104 and 105, and he points out how such a process gives an outline similar to that of a palisade cut into points at its summit, a precaution that is often taken to render the escalade of such an obstacle more difficult, and M. Place is inclined to think that the idea of these crenellations was suggested by those of a wooden palisade, a succession of rectangles being substituted for a triangle in order to meet the special conditions of the new material.
All around are the outer lines of ramparts, walls beyond walls, their crenellations climbing the heights, their angle fortresses dominating the precipices.
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