The innocents abroad; . and I wanted tofollow the road till we were abreast of them, but the others-overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill im-mediately in our front—and from its summit saw another—climbed it and saw another ! It was an hour of exhaustingwork. Soon we came upon a row of open graves, cut in the solid rock—(for a whileone of them served Soc-rates for a prison)—wepassed around the shoul-der of the hill, and thecitadel, in all its ruinedmagnificence, burst uponus ! We hurried acrossthe ravine and up awinding road, and stoodon the old Acropolis, withthe prodigious
The innocents abroad; . and I wanted tofollow the road till we were abreast of them, but the others-overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill im-mediately in our front—and from its summit saw another—climbed it and saw another ! It was an hour of exhaustingwork. Soon we came upon a row of open graves, cut in the solid rock—(for a whileone of them served Soc-rates for a prison)—wepassed around the shoul-der of the hill, and thecitadel, in all its ruinedmagnificence, burst uponus ! We hurried acrossthe ravine and up awinding road, and stoodon the old Acropolis, withthe prodigious walls ofthe citadel toweringabove our heads. Wedid not stop to inspecttheir massive blocks ofmarble, or measure theirheight, or guess at theirextraordinary thicknesSybut passed at oncethrough a great archedpassage like a railwaytunnel, and went straight to the gate that leads to the ancienttemples. It was locked ! So, after all, it seemed that we werenot to see the sreat Partlienon face to face. We sat down and. THE ASSAULT. AMONG THE GLORIES OF THE PAST. 345 held a council of war. Result: the gate was only a flimsystructure of wood—we would break it down. It seemed likedesecration, but then we had traveled far, and our necessitieswere urgent. We could not hunt up guides and keepers—wemust be on the ship before daylight. So we argued. Thiswas all very fine, but when we came to break the gate, wecould not do it. We moved around an angle of the wall andfound a low bastion—eight feet high without—ten or twelvewithin. Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to fol-low. By dint of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top,,but some loose stones crumbled away and fell with a crashinto the court within. There was instantly a banging of doorsand a shout. Denny dropped from the wall in a twinklingsand we retreated in disorder to the gate. Xerxes took thatmighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christywhen his five millions of soldiers and camp-follow
Size: 1279px × 1953px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
