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I pace the length of the three Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbee, mightiest masses of quarried rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices.
One of the monsters seen by the explorers remained on those rocks until the middle of our own century. It was called by the Indians the Piasa. More than two centuries of beating winter storms had not effaced the brilliant picture when it was quarried away by a stupidly barbarous civilization.
If she had known the real difference that unconsciously kept her sons apart, her heart would have ached yet more. The stone was quarried high on the mountain, and a direct road was made for bringing it down to the water-side. The castle profited by the road in accessibility, but its impregnability was so far lessened.
Darwin supplied would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them; I tried, therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at once more sound and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as a builder, not as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought against me of not having made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint against an architect on the score of his not having quarried with his own hands a single one of the stones which he has used in building.
'Please to take the light into the pantry for one minute, he whispered cautiously, with a fervent hope that Miss Anne would do so without requiring any further explanations; for he was lost if Black Thompson or Davies were lying in wait near at hand. Very thankfully he heard Miss Anne's step across the quarried floor, and in a moment afterwards the light shone through a low window close by.
Where, now, thousands of Moslems, some on foot, some on richly caparisoned steeds, were passing to and fro, turbaned and robed after the manner of their tribe, with such adornment as they had stolen or adopted from intercourse with splendor-loving nations, and where long trains of camels dragged quarried stones to the building, in former times only an occasional ox-cart with creaking wheels was to be seen, an Egyptian riding an ass or a bare-backed nag, and now and then a few insolent Greek soldiers.
The river here is six hundred feet in width; the space between the two stone towers that support the bridge on either shore is eight hundred and fifty feet; the height above the water, two hundred feet. The towers are not built on the top of the bank, but a platform for each has been quarried out of the steep sides of the precipice, about thirty feet below the edge of the cliffs.
But having in the space of a year exhausted his stock of stories, the imam, who is blessed with an excellent memory, discovering that he was telling the same stories over again, shut him up in a tower constructed of vermilion stone quarried on the upper waters of the great river Euphrates.
The surface of the ground upon which Nauvoo is built is very uneven, though there are no great elevations. A few feet below the soil is a vast bed of limestone, from which excellent building material can be quarried, to almost any extent.
Its ancient fortifications, which of late years have been rapidly giving place to modern improvements, consisted of a double line of walls, guarded by towers, pierced by strongly-fortified gates, and surrounded by a deep and wide moat. The ramparts were built of quarried stone, which, though much harder than sandstone, was far more difficult to bind together with mortar.
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