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Updated: May 17, 2025
The eye follows the terraces with graceful balustrades in the shadow of old trees, dwells on the fanciful Renaissance bridge, that looks as if its first intention was to span the stream in the usual manner, but, having gone some distance across, changed its mind, and turned off at an abrupt angle; then the little pavilion in the style of Francis I., connected with a machicolated gateway, fixes the attention.
On one occasion, a few days before the opening ceremony, the engineer was watching a mason laying the machicolated coping on the tower when the trowel slipped and dropped forty feet to the ground. Instantly there arose a stream of profanity from the top of that sacred edifice. Came a chuckle at Belding's shoulder.
Each story is pierced by loop-holes for firing into the street below. On the machicolated summit is a square platform, where in the course of many peaceful ages a bay-tree has come to grow of a goodly size. About this bay-tree tangled weeds and tufted grasses wave in the wind.
Of the outer fortifications there remains a brick gateway, with Gothic arch carrying a high machicolated tower, connected to which is a fragment of the wall. To this old houses, half brick, half wood, still cling, like those little wasps' nests that one sees sometimes upon the sides of the rocks. On entering the small fourteenth-century church, I found that it had been decorated for a funeral.
The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter's lodge at the entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and pansies for remembrance. We didn't see those flowers with our bodies' eyes, but what of that?
Built of gray granite which darkened with time and weather stains, its massive walls, machicolated roof, and tall arched clock-tower lifted their leaden outlines against the sky, and cast a brooding shadow over the town, lying below; a grim perpetual menace to all who subsequently found themselves locked in its reformatory arms.
Only a few more Legations had established themselves there, and, by clustering together, they formed what might by courtesy be called a Legation Quarter, which lay between the pink wall of the Imperial City the innermost of the ring of three cities that form Peking and the frowning, machicolated grey wall of the Tartar town.
She preferred the drive along the lake shore, and the Bowman's new palace with its machicolated cornice. It was all business, intensely business: business affected even social moments. Later, when Milly became sophisticated enough to generalize, she complained that the men were "all one kind"; they could "talk of nothing but business to a woman."
The great bell in the tower of the arsenal told twelve of the day, and already the broader waters near the rios which led to the high machicolated walls surrounding this famous Venetian stronghold were crowded with gondolas of the people and barges from the islands filled with men, women, and children, jubilant with holiday speech and brilliant in gala colors; for this was one of those perpetually recurring festas which so endeared this City of the Sea to its pleasure-loving people.
We can scarcely think the scene real, so completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of the antique time. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection.
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