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Updated: May 5, 2025
But at night the drawbridges rose and the portcullises descended each with its own peculiar creak, and jar, and scrape, setting the young rooks cawing in reply from every pinnacle and tree-top never later than the last moment when the warder could see anything larger than a cat on the brow of the road this side the village.
Turrets and battlements, portcullises and draw-bridges, rise from the deep ravine, sublime and inaccessible; yet they are still a thousand feet below us! What would be the effect could we survey them from the stream itself, within the gloomy crevice of the cañon? Only their size convinces us that they are works of Nature, not of Art. Upon their spires we see a score of eagles' nests.
After sundry adventures, Huon sets out on a journey to Babylon, and seeks an audience with the Emir. He tells of his arrival at what he describes as the castle, and how, after long parley with the porter, the drawbridge is let down and the great gate opened, and he finds himself in an arched way, with a series of portcullises showing their teeth overhead.
Cannon were run out; matches kept lighted; whole battalions maintained under arms; munitions and provisions of war laid in, as though to withstand a regular siege; drawbridges pulled up and portcullises lowered, with great clanking of chains and gnashing of old iron teeth; and rich sport it was to see those old rust-eaten engines once more brought into gear again.
The castle crowns the centre of the rock, and is a most romantic construction, possessing bastions, towers, portcullises, drawbridges and all the paraphernalia of a genuine mediæval fortress. It was built upon the site of a much more ancient edifice in 1542, and is a very remarkable specimen of the military architecture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Half the other great places I go to are mushroom greatness, but this is the real old thing of Druid remains and the old baronial castle of knights in armour and fair Saxon-looking women, and with heavy portcullises to enter by, and dungeons and subterranean passages, etc.
The man's armour is engraved with roses, pomegranates, portcullises, and other badges of Henry VIII and his first queen Katharine of Arragon, and has on the metal skirt which imitates the cloth bases of the time the letters H and K. The horse armour, probably made afterwards in England by one of Henry's German armourers, is also covered with engraving, and has panels on which are depicted scenes from the life and death of St.
In its thickness she could see grooves, where evidently had once been portcullises, but these had disappeared long ago. "It is a wonderful place," she said to her father. "I am glad that I came. Have you been all over it?" "No; only between the first and second walls, and once between the second and third. The old temple, or whatever it is, is on the top, and into that they would never admit us.
Then first it was that the consuls of Mende began to realise that it was no longer an insurrection they had on hand but a war, and Mende being the capital of Gevaudan and liable to be attacked at any moment, they set themselves to bring into repair their counterscarps, ravelins, bastions, gates, portcullises, moats, walls, turrets, ramparts, parapets, watchtowers, and the gear of their cannon, and having laid in a stock of firearms, powder and ball, they formed eight companies each fifty strong, composed of townsmen, and a further band of one hundred and fifty peasants drawn from the neighbouring country.
They went back again to the withdrawing-room; a little cedar-fire had been kindled under the wide chimney; and the room was full of dancing shadows. The great plaster-pendants, the roses, the crowns, and the portcullises on the ceiling seemed to waver in the firelight, for Mr. Buxton at a sign from Mary blew out the four tapers that were burning in the sconces.
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