Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
Cabana, finished in 1774 at a cost of $14,000,000, lies some 500 yards southeast of El Morro, on the east side of Havana Bay. Toward the city it exposes a vertical stone wall of irregular trace, with salients at intervals. Toward the Morro is a bastioned face protected by a deep ditch, sally port, and drawbridge. Eastward and southward a beautifully constructed land front incloses the work.
How the mass seems to be resisting the siege of time, throwing out its salients here and there, and meeting the onset of the foes like a military engineer. The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is accounted for by the fact that they were carved out from the top downward, and that each successive story is vastly older than the one immediately beneath it.
The value of its salients and reëntrant angles was not likely to be overlooked, for it had been only recently acquired by their crusading ancestors. The height and strength of its powerful walls enabled it to be of the greatest service to the soldiers of that day. They saw that it was virtually impregnable for any artillery with which they were familiar.
I can see, also, up the Colorado Chiquito, through a very ragged and broken canyon, with sharp salients set out from the walls on either side, their points overlapping, so that a huge tooth of marble on one side seems to be set between two teeth on the opposite; and I can also get glimpses of walls standing away back from the river, while over my head are mural escarpments not possible to be scaled.
The visitor standing upon the south side looks across the great chasm upon the bewildering maze of monumental forms, some of them as suggestive of human workmanship as anything in nature well can be, crumbling turrets and foundations, forms as distinctly square as any work of man's hands, vast fortress-like structures with salients and entering angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, huge pyramidal piles rising story on story, three thousand feet or more above their foundations, each successive story or superstructure faced by a huge vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that connects it with the story next below.
Deep salients had been driven in on both their flanks, but orders had been received to hold the bridge at all costs, as, if a counter-attack could be launched, it would be an enfilading one made by troops brought across the river.
In later times the fortifications were of a much ruder kind, though Maximilian represents them as having pointed salients to serve as bastions. La Verendrye mentions some peculiar customs of the Mandans which answer exactly to those described by more recent observers.
With perfect serenity the engineers set about their task with line, rule, and level, measuring out the bulwarks and bastions, the miniature salients, half-moons, and ditches, as neatly and methodically as if there were no ceaseless cannonade in their ears, and as if the workmen were not at every moment summoned to repel assaults upon the outward wall.
It is not surprising that the Spanish conquerors, warriors themselves and descendants of twenty generations of a fighting race, accustomed as they were to the salients of European fortresses, should have looked upon Sacsahuaman as a fortress. To them the military use of its bastions was perfectly obvious.
Sometimes gorges of the second or third order have met before reaching the brink of the Grand Canyon, and then great salients are cut off from the wall and stand out as buttes huge pavilions in the architecture of the canyon. The scenic elements thus described are fused and combined in very different ways.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking