An immense rift soared above him, stretching its tortuous
ramifications, at different points, into every part of the wall that was
immediately visible. The whole structure seemed, at this place, to have
received a sudden and tremendous wrench. But for the support of the
sounder fortifications at each side of it, it could not have sustained
itself after the shock. The Pagan gazed aloft, into the fearful breaches
which yawned above him, with ungovernable awe. His small, fitful light
was not sufficient to show him any of their terminations. They looked,
as he beheld them in dark relief against the rest of the hollow part of
the wall, like mighty serpents twining their desolating path right
upward to the ramparts above; and he, himself, as he crouched on his
pinnacle with his little light by his side, was reduced by the wild
grandeur, the vast, solemn gloom of the obscure, dusky, and fantastic
objects around him, to the stature of a pigmy. Could he have been seen
from the ramparts high overhead, as he now peered down behind his
lantern into the cavities and irregularities below him, he would have
looked, with his flickering light, like a mole led by a glow-worm.
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