A Baptist Abroad: Travels and Adventures of Europe and all Bible LandsWhittle, Walter Andrew
Religion
A Baptist Abroad: Travels and Adventures of Europe and all Bible Lands
Whittle, Walter Andrew
Europe -- Description and travel; Middle East -- Description and travel
The wheat is, of course, sown broadcast. The trees, twelve to eighteen
feet high, are planted in straight rows, fifteen feet apart. The
healthy vines clamber up the mulberries, and wreathe themselves into
huge and rich festoons from tree to tree. The ground rapidly glides
from under us, the orchards, the villages and peasant homes, one by one
dash by us. Now the sun is bending low in the evening sky, and, looking
out over the broad expanse of waters on our left, we see not far away
the island of Elba, the first exiled home of Napoleon Bonaparte. But
this beautiful island was too small for so great a spirit. After one
year’s confinement here, Napoleon, rising up in his madness and might,
broke the political fetters which the allied Powers had placed upon
him, returned to Paris, gathered an army and marched to Waterloo. There
his already waning star went down in blood to rise no more (1815).
As the dying day begins to wrap herself in the sombre folds of evening,
we find ourselves in Pisa, a quiet little town of 26,000 inhabitants,
beautifully situated on both banks of the Arno, six miles from the
sea. The night comes and goes. Next morning I am standing on the top
of Pisa’s “Leaning Tower,” in time to see the sun rise. This tower
is one of the wonders, not of the ancient, but modern world. It is
some thirty-three feet in diameter and one hundred and eighty feet in
height, and leans thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. This oblique
or leaning position gives it a very peculiar appearance. It looks as
if it were falling; you expect every moment to see it dashed to pieces
against the ground. But it has been in this position some 650 years,
and, if we may argue from the past, many moons will wax and wane before
it strikes the ground. No one knows whether the original design was to
build a leaning tower, or whether in the course of construction one
side of the foundation gave way, and thus left the tower in an oblique
position. It was by dropping balls from the summit of this tower that
Galileo verified his theories regarding the laws of gravitation. It was
the swaying of the bronze lamp which still hangs in the cathedral at
the foot of this tower that first suggested to Galileo the idea of a
pendulum.
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL AND LEANING TOWER OF PISA.]
The Campo Santo, or burial-ground, of Pisa is interesting because of
its history. After the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land, in
the year 1190, Archbishop Ubaldo had fifty-three ship-loads of earth
brought hither from Mount Calvary in order that the dead might repose
in “holy ground.” What men need to-day is not the earth of Calvary for
their dead bodies, but the Christ of Calvary for their living spirits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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