Drawing yet
nearer, we found the hillside immediately above us strewn with thousands
upon thousands of great fragments of stone. It looked as if some great
ruin had taken place there, only it was too vast a ruin to have been the
dismemberment and dissolution of anything made by man.
We could now see the castle on the height pretty distinctly. It seemed
to impend over the precipice; and close to the base of the latter we saw
the street of a town on as strange and inconvenient a foundation as ever
one was built upon. I suppose the inhabitants of the village were
dependants of the old knight of the castle; his brotherhood of robbers,
as they married and had families, settled there under the shelter of the
eagle's nest. But the singularity is, how a community of people have
contrived to live and perpetuate themselves so far out of the reach of
the world's help, and seemingly with no means of assisting in the world's
labor. I cannot imagine how they employ themselves except in begging,
and even that branch of industry appears to be left to the old women and
the children.
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