第32章

Having dismounted, I left the guide, and proceeded to ascend the hill on which the tower stood.Though the ascent was very gentle I did not accomplish it without difficulty; the ground was covered with sharp stones, which, in two or three instances, cut through my boots and wounded my feet; and the distance was much greater than I had expected.I at last arrived at the ruin, for such it was.I found it had been one of those watch towers or small fortresses called in Portuguese ATALAIAS; it was square, and surrounded by a wall, broken down in many places.The tower itself had no door, the lower part being of solid stone work; but on one side were crevices at intervals between the stones, for the purpose of placing the feet, and up this rude staircase I climbed to a small apartment, about five feet square, from which the top had fallen.It commanded an extensive view from all sides, and had evidently been built for the accommodation of those whose business it was to keep watch on the frontier, and at the appearance of an enemy to alarm the country by signals -probably by a fire.Resolute men might have defended themselves in this little fastness against many assailants, who must have been completely exposed to their arrows or musketry in the ascent.

Being about to leave the place, I heard a strange cry behind a part of the wall which I had not visited, and hastening thither, I found a miserable object in rags, seated upon a stone.It was a maniac - a man about thirty years of age, and I believe deaf and dumb; there he sat, gibbering and mowing, and distorting his wild features into various dreadful appearances.There wanted nothing but this object to render the scene complete; banditti amongst such melancholy desolation would have been by no means so much in keeping.But the maniac, on his stone, in the rear of the wind-beaten ruin, overlooking the blasted heath, above which scowled the leaden heaven, presented such a picture of gloom and misery as Ibelieve neither painter nor poet ever conceived in the saddest of their musings.This is not the first instance in which it has been my lot to verify the wisdom of the saying, that truth is sometimes wilder than fiction.

I remounted my mule, and proceeded till, on the top of another hill, my guide suddenly exclaimed, "there is Elvas." Ilooked in the direction in which he pointed, and beheld a town perched on the top of a lofty hill.On the other side of a deep valley towards the left rose another hill, much higher, on the top of which is the celebrated fort of Elvas, believed to be the strongest place in Portugal.Through the opening between the fort and the town, but in the background and far in Spain, I discerned the misty sides and cloudy head of a stately mountain, which I afterwards learned was Albuquerque, one of the loftiest of Estremadura.

We now got into a cultivated country, and following the road, which wound amongst hedge-rows, we arrived at a place where the ground began gradually to shelve down.Here, on the right, was the commencement of an aqueduct by means of which the town on the opposite hill was supplied; it was at this point scarcely two feet in altitude, but, as we descended, it became higher and higher, and its proportions more colossal.

Near the bottom of the valley it took a turn to the left, bestriding the road with one of its arches.I looked up, after passing under it; the water must have been flowing near a hundred feet above my head, and I was filled with wonder at the immensity of the structure which conveyed it.There was, however, one feature which was no slight drawback to its pretensions to grandeur and magnificence; the water was supported not by gigantic single arches, like those of the aqueduct of Lisbon, which stalk over the valley like legs of Titans, but by three layers of arches, which, like three distinct aqueducts, rise above each other.The expense and labour necessary for the erection of such a structure must have been enormous; and, when we reflect with what comparative ease modern art would confer the same advantage, we cannot help congratulating ourselves that we live in times when it is not necessary to exhaust the wealth of a province to supply a town on a hill with one of the first necessaries of existence.