To his astonishment, he found
that the brickwork had in many places so completely mouldered away, that
he could move it easily with his fingers. The cause of the trifling
noise that he had heard was now fully explained: hundreds of lizards
had made their homes between the fissures of the bricks; the animal that
he had permitted to escape had taken refuge in one of these cavities,
and in the hurry of its flight had detached several of the loose
crumbling fragments that surrounded its hiding-place.
No content, however, with the discovery he had already made, he retired
a little, and, looking stedfastly up through some trees which in this
particular place grew at the foot of the wall, he saw that its surface
was pierced in many places by great irregular rifts, some of which
extended nearly to its whole height. In addition to this, he perceived
that the mass of the structure at one particular point, leaned
considerably out of the perpendicular. Astounded at what he beheld, he
took a stick from the ground, and inserting it in one of the lowest and
smallest of the cracks, easily succeeded in forcing it entirely into the
wall, part of which seemed to be hollow, and part composed of the same
rotten brickwork which had at first attracted his attention.
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