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Updated: June 19, 2025
Let this hill yield you a town in which to walk, with a street of many-storied houses; with other promenades along ramparts as broad as church aisles; with dungeons, cloisters, halls, guard-rooms, abbatial gateways, and a cathedral whose flying buttresses seemed to spring from mid-air and to end in a cloud such was the world into which we awoke on the heights of Mont St. Michel.
In burghers' mansions, peasants' cottages, mechanics' back-parlours, on board herring smacks, canal boats, and East Indiamen; in shops, counting-rooms, farmyards, guard-rooms, ale-houses; on the exchange, in the tennis-court, on the mall; at banquets, at burials, christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts.
Besides these central buildings, which may be called the prison proper, there were a great many others scattered about, intended for various purposes, such as kitchens, bakehouses, guard-rooms, turnkeys' lodges, and, more important than all to the safe custody of the prisoners, two large wooden barracks like each other, one at the east and the other at the west of the whole enclosure, for the accommodation of two regiments of infantry that formed the garrison.
Then, little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined itself: "that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to serve at need as guard-rooms," says the County History.
I now began to read the papers and cultivate politics enthusiastically; however, the social intercourse of the civic world did not attract me sufficiently to make me false to my beloved academic associates. I followed them faithfully from the guard-rooms to the ordinary bars, where their splendour as men of the literary world now sought retirement.
The image of the outside always remains distinct; I keep it apart from other images of the same sort; it makes, a picture sufficiently ineffaceable. But the guard-rooms, winding staircases, loopholes, prisons, repeat themselves and intermingle; they have a wearisome family likeness.
"I am too old and stiff," said Dessauer, shaking his head mournfully, yet with obvious desire in the itching fingers of his sword-hand; "let him seek out one of the brisk young kerls that are drumming at the blade-play all the time down there in the square by the guard-rooms." "Nay, it is to be principals only; there is to be no fighting of seconds.
They may have been merely guard-rooms, since they appear to have formed a portion of a high tower. The palace at Nebbi Ynnus was probably a more important work; but the superstitious regard of the natives for the supposed tomb of Jonah has hitherto frustrated all attempts made by Europeans to explore that mass of ruins.
This building consisted of a single magnificent chamber, with a portico, and probably guard-rooms, in front, of dimensions quite unequalled upon the platform. The portico was 183 feet long by 52 feet deep, and was sustained by sixteen pillars, about 33 feet high, arranged in two rows of eight. The great chamber behind was a square of 227 feet, and had therefore an area of about 51,000 feet.
Everywhere arose the auricular vapour, as it were, of action, undefined and indefinable, the hum of the human hive, compounded of all confluent noises the chatter of the servants' hall and the nursery, the stamping of horses, the ringing of harness, the ripping of the chains of kenneled dogs, the hollow stamping of heavy boots, the lowing of cattle, with sounds besides so strange to the ears of Dorothy that they set her puzzling in vain to account for them; not to mention the chaff of the guard-rooms by the gates, and the scolding and clatter of the kitchen.
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