With mountains he was familiar. Their grandeur did not oppress him. They were the work of the infinite God who made the whole world, who set the sun and the moon and stars high in the heavens to give us light. The creation of the universe by the Almighty hand was no new idea in the boy's mind. But that men, only _men_, should have put that vast pile together, its towers, its massive walls that had outlasted hundreds of years, was suggestive of possibilities and capabilities that took his breath away.
He stood there long, not so much because he was tired with his five-miles' rough walk that hot morning, but to overcome his first sensations of awe. Then he passed between the two great towers, and traversed courts and alleys, citadel, hall, chapel, whatever the pillared areas, the vast walls and arched windows, may suggest to antiquaries. To the boy they suggested only a marvellous enigma it was his fixed determination to solve _some_ day.
In his explorations he had to scramble over the fragmentary ruins of a second drawbridge between flanking towers, over which the friendly ivy had thrown an evergreen mantle. Here he stood gazing astonished at the mass of solid masonry which had walled the castle in, and at a great arched gateway under which he passed. He groped his way down to an underground chamber where had been a smelting furnace and a mint; and from that wonder of wonders, a staircase to the turret-top.
But nothing held him so spellbound as the leaning tower, which, with chambers and passages complete, and outer walls full ten feet thick, overhung its base nearly four yards, a threatening mass that so had hung in mid air since the convulsion that had rent the tower in twain centuries before, yet held aloft as surely as the tower of Bologna or of Pisa.
Nothing knew William of these, or of battles or sieges, or of the force of water let in on molten metal; but he could wonder how the stones held together, and he could argue with himself that what had been done might be done.
Aladdin's enchanted garden of precious stones was nothing to what Caerphilly Castle was to the boy William Edwards.
Although, being warned by previous experience, William had stuffed his new pockets with bread before leaving home in the morning, he found that was a sorry substitute for a hearty dinner, and when he limped home in the waning light of the long summer evening, supper at the farm was over and cleared away. It was a doleful prospect, for there was an aching void in his interior that all the wonders of Caerphilly Castle had not served to fill.