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For the first time in his life he felt distrustful of himself, and he suspected, too, that Furneaux was only covering abject failure by a display of high spirits. "Why so pensive an attitude, James?" inquired the other softly. "Are you still wondering what the extrados of a voussoir is?" "I don't care a tuppenny damn what it is." "But that's where you're wrong.
The pavement of the terrace, which consists of a double bed of large bricks, rests upon the extrados of the upper channel. This vault is semicircular; it has three voussoirs on each side, which, with the key, make seven in each vertical course.
I'll ask him a simple question, and he will give you a perfect example of a direct answer. Tomlinson, can you tell me what the extrados of a voussoir is?" "No, Mr. Furneaux, I can not," said the butler, smiling at what he regarded as the little man's humor. "There!" cried Furneaux delightedly. "Ain't I a prophet? No evasions about Tomlinson, are there?"
Five hundred and forty by eight hundred and twenty feet, with ten acres and a quarter under roof, it equals the halls of a dozen State cattle-shows, The style is Gothic, the three transepts looking like those of as many cathedrals stripped of the roof, the extrados taking its place. The nave that spits them is a hundred and twenty-five feet wide, with an elevation of seventy-five feet.
That's where you're crass and pig-headed. The extrados of a voussoir " "Oh, kill it, and let it die happy " " is the outer curve of a wedge-shaped stone used for building an arch. Now, mark you, those are words of merit. Wedge, arch wedges of fact which shall construct the arch of evidence. We'll have our man in the dock across that bridge before we are much older." "Confound it, how?
From all that we know of Assyrian buildings of this kind we may be sure that the original of the picture was so placed. The form of the mound may be described as reproducing the extrados of a depressed arch. This is the only form on which flights of steps with a curve similar to that here shown could be constructed.
In one division the bedding of the bricks is strictly horizontal; in the next it is slightly concave, and forms a very flat reversed arch, of which the extrados rests upon the ground. The alternation of these two methods is regularly repeated. The object of this arrangement is obscure; but it is said that buildings thus constructed are especially fitted to resist earthquake shocks.
The openings left at the summits of the other courses must have been filled in in some way, and, in fact, the line of voids which ran along the top of the extrados was filled in with brick earth, beaten tight and forming the best of keys. So that the vault was completed and consolidated by the same material as that used to make its channel impervious to water.
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