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Updated: May 14, 2025
His half-famished sentinels gazed from the watch-towers of the castle all around, looking for some cloud of distant dust, or weapon glancing in the sun, which might denote the approach of friends coming to their rescue. This lasted fourteen days.
Haymakers were abroad, and I heard the sound of their scythes cutting through the heavy swathes with all their flowers; but the sunshine had not yet flashed down into the deep valley, and the grasshoppers were waiting to hail it from their watch-towers in the green herbage and on the purple heather.
As we approached the open gate, flanked on either side by watch-towers and guarded by soldiers wearing Arab fezes and loose white garments, a great rabble came forth to meet us. We heard the din of tom-toms beaten within the city, joyous shouts, and loud ear-piercing blasts upon those great horns formed out of elephant tusks.
East, west, north, south, the lines of billowy curves in the far distance grow vaster, till we come in sight of what seems indeed a colossal city towering westward over the horizon; a city well built, girt round with battlements, bristling with watch-towers, outlined in gold and amethyst upon a faint azure sky. It is our first glimpse of Montpellier-le-Vieux.
There was a sudden hush, for the bells of the Campanile of San Marco had given the signal, and there was a great stir before the Piazza a train of gondolas was sweeping into line far down the Canal Grande; the guards on the watch-towers of the arsenal were full of animation; the gondolas of the orderlies were buzzing like bees about the barge of the grand admiral, who awaited the coming of the Doge, in all his magnificence of satin ceremonial robes.
"It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail, and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all sparkling with fireflies old watch-towers and the roofs of white villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes the sound of mandolins "
Beyond Djelfa, on the low mountains that alone broke the monotony of the dismal plain, little watch-towers rose dark along the sky-line watch-towers old as Roman days.
"It cannot be denied," says another observer, placed on one of our national watch-towers in a foreign capital, "it cannot be denied that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds, "everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of free institutions, that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy."
But we could not get at the English heart, and the English head was continually thrust against ours. The fires may have burned warmly on many a hearth, but we could not see them. The only light that shot athwart the waters was from the high watch-towers, and it was lurid. This wrought a change.
Hills rose, wild and rocky, shutting in our road, and brigands would have been appropriate, as in some mountain pass of Spain. There were sheer gray cliffs like castles and burnt-out churches, and watch-towers.
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