From
this well a stone pipe or tunnel, two feet nine inches in diameter, led
up to the very roof, access to it being given on each of the four
floors into which the keep was divided within. These apartments one
and all were divided from east to west by walls five feet thick, so
that on each floor there were two chambers forty-six feet long by
about twenty feet in breadth. That this enormous keep is the work of
Gundulph and contemporary with the Tower of London, there seems to be
no reason to doubt. Of the great part it played in English history I
have already spoken. But even in ruin it impresses one as few things
left to us nowadays, when everything we make is so monstrous in
comparison with the work of our fathers, are able to do. To stand
there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look
out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with
factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway and
the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards down the stream, is to
receive an impression of the fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our
civilisation such as few other places in South England would be able
to give us suddenly between two heart beats.
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