they felled the great trees; but the greatest
trees of all the bowmen spared, oaks that had stood there for ages and
ages of men; they left them to grip the earth for a while longer, for a
few more human generations.

On the fourth day the two windows at the back of the bowmen's cottage
began to darken, and that evening Castle Rodriguez was fifteen feet
high. And still the hundred bowmen hewed at the forest, bringing
sunlight bright on to grass that was shadowed by oaks for ages. And at
the end of the fifth day they began to roof the lower rooms and make
their second floor: and still the castle grew a layer a day, though the
second storey they built with thinner trees that were only three feet
through, which were more easily carried to their place by the pulleys.
And now they began to heap up rocks in a mass of mortar against the
wall on the outside, till a steep slope guarded the whole of the lower
part of the castle against fire from any attacker if war should come
that way, in any of the centuries that were yet to be: and the deep
windows they guarded with bars of iron.

The shape of the castle showed itself clearly now, rising on each side
of the bowmen's cottage and behind it, with a tower at each of its
corners. To the left of the old cottage the main doorway opened to the
great hall, in which a pile of a few huge oaks was being transformed
into a massive stair. Three figures of strange men held up this ceiling
with their heads and uplifted hands, when the castle was finished; but
as yet the carvers had only begun their work, so that only here and
there an eye peeped out, or a smile flickered, to give any expression
to the curious faces of these fabulous creatures of the wood, which
were slowly taking their shape out of three trees whose roots were
still in the earth below the floor. In an upper storey one of these
trees became a tall cupboard; and the shelves and the sides and the
back and the top of it were all one piece of oak.

All the interior of the castle was of wood, hollowed into alcoves and
polished, or carved into figures leaning out from the walls. So vast
were the timbers that the walls, at a glance, seemed almost one piece
of wood. And the centuries that were coming to Spain darkened the walls
as they came, through autumnal shades until they were all black, as
though they all mourned in secret for lost generations; but they have
not yet crumbled.

The fireplaces they made with great square red t