A manor without battlements
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Assim, a casa era um verdadeiro solar de fidalgo portuguez, menos as ameias e a barbacan, as quaes havião sido substituidas por essa muralha de rochedos inaccessiveis, que offerecião uma defeza natural, e uma resistencia inexpuguavel.
Thus the house was a true Portuguese nobleman's manor, lacking only the battlements and the barbican, which had been replaced by that wall of unscalable crags, offering a natural defense and an impregnable strength.
The summing image: the house was a true Portuguese nobleman's manor, lacking only the battlements and barbican — replaced by that wall of unscalable cliffs, which gave a natural defense and an impregnable strength.
Alencar closes the description with the image that governs the whole novel: a castle whose walls are the cliffs themselves, Old-World nobility fused to New-World stone. The two verbatim slips the source prints here — barbacan and inexpuguavel — we keep exactly as they stand, small scars on a sentence about a fortress that cannot be stormed.
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