by Rembrandt Ramilo

The West had settled in the East for hundreds of years in the past.When they had left,their cultural imprints have remained in the East. Any town in the Southeast may become a place where western cultural patterns are apparent.

At the foreground,across the road stands a one-hundred-thirty-four year old arch made of nine by fifteen inches Spanish era adobe bricks. Approximately,this arch is sized fifty feet athwart,forty feet altitude,and six feet solid thick.

It has a tripartite top-curved semi-ellipse archway,the bigger one in the middle,the smaller two on its sides.Because of time-length,the surface-chipped bricks are now marked by patches of mixed white,gray,and black colors,some outgrowth of green-leaved herbs protruding along the horizontal plane near the crest.

Very close to the wall’s facade,six tall vertical classic Corinthian pillars are proportionately distributed,two on each side of the middle archway and one on each arch’s margins.

On the entablature are five artistic stone cuts.In the central section is a stone design of a beclouded perhaps an obverse Spanish emblem placed in a boat-like structure that has a slight biconcave upper-end edge left and right.The emblem is escorted by two sculptures of a sitting cat,glancing sideways,with an S-shaped fluttering tail. Finally on the far sides is a carved arborvitae-like figure with a wavy border.

A driver of a car, heading to it, can choose which of the three entryway will he use,any of them which is clear,available and convenient.If all of them are busy,then the driver stops and waits.

The construction of an arch is complex and clever.Mutual pressure is indispensable to all points,inward,outward,downward and upward.Arch-building has been very rich and famous in ancient European history,in Greece,in Rome, in Spain even since the fifth,the sixth,and seventh century B.C.

The methods and techniques they had used to build them gave way to the putting together of other necessary infrastructures.

Time may not let us survive the future to see more of the practical use of this creation,yet in our given time to live in the present,we will always be fascinated by the achievements of the colonial past.

For more than one hundred years,as long as it remains, a constant inter-crossing array of vehicles runs through it…

Note:

Colonial Arch is not the first piece Eastlit has published by Rembrandt Ramilo. His previous published work:

The Old Lake Port was published in the July 2013 issue of Eastlit.