in obtaining
cellars and underground room, or in preparing for some grand features or
particular parts of the wall, or in some mistaken idea of
decoration,--into which errors we had better not pursue him until we
understand something more of the rest of the building: let us therefore
proceed to consider the wall veil.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Many walls are slightly sloped or curved towards their tops,
and have buttresses added to them (that of the Queen's Bench Prison
is a curious instance of the vertical buttress and inclined wall);
but in all such instances the slope of the wall is properly to be
considered a condition of incorporated buttress.

CHAPTER V.

THE WALL VEIL.

Sec. I. The summer of the year 1849 was spent by the writer in researches
little bearing upon his present subject, and connected chiefly with
proposed illustrations of the mountain forms in the works of J. M. W.
Turner. But there are sometimes more valuable lessons to be learned in
the school of nature than in that of Vitruvius, and a fragment of
building among the Alps is singularly illustrative of the chief feature
which I have at present to develope as necessary to the perfection of
the wall veil.

It is a fragment of some size; a group of broken walls, one of them
overhanging; crowned with a cornice, nodding some hundred and fifty feet
over its massy flank, three thousand above its glacier base, and
fourteen thousand above the sea,--a wall truly of some majesty, at once
the most precipitous and the strongest mass in the whole chain of the
Alps, the Mont Cervin.

Sec. II. It has been falsely represented as a peak or tower. It is a vast
ridged promontory, connected at its western root with the Dent d'Erin,
and lifting itself like a rearing horse with its face to the east. All
the way along the flank of it, for half a day's journey on the Zmutt
glacier, the grim black terraces of its foundations range almost without
a break; and the clouds, when their day's work is done, and they are
weary, lay themselves down on those foundation steps, and rest till
dawn, each with his leagues of grey mantle stretched along the grisly
ledge, and the cornice of the mighty wall gleaming in the moonlight,
three thousand feet above.

Sec. III. The eastern face of the promontory is hewn down, as if by the
single sweep of a sword, from the crest of it to the base; hewn concave
and smooth, like the hollow of a wave: on each flank of it