Control of the Homs Gap is why the Knights Hospitallers spent so much money in the 13th century building the Krak des Chevaliers, the greatest Crusader castle in the world, with its massive towers and huge concentric masonry walls.
And she wrote simply and sweetly about domestic matters: "shining" the huge kitchen, fixing masonry, rearranging the living room furniture.
Even in Paris, he loved an august association and lived in a house in the Cour de Rohan that was once described as "carved out of the huge vine-clad masonry of Philippe-Auguste's fortifications".
But the suspects refused to give themselves up and, as a unit of special police broke in, one man inside detonated a huge bomb that blasted masonry and body parts across the street.
Each of the game's boss characters was designed so that their bodies would exude a certain motif; for example, StoneMan.EXE was meant to look like a huge castle made from stone masonry.
There was this huge explosion and a piece of masonry landed at Joseph's feet, a big chunk of concrete with a slice of red brick underneath.
In London the young Swiss engineer Charles Labelye, entrusted with the building of the first bridge at Westminster, evolved a novel and ingenious method of sinking the foundations, employing huge timber caissons that were filled with masonry after they had been floated into position for each pier.
Around its top was built a massive wall of cyclopean masonry (a type of construction using huge blocks without mortar).
Giant kapok trees, some said to be up to 200-years-old, have taken root round the crumbling masonry, like the tentacles of a huge stone-eating octopus.
Rows of flying buttresses, a soaring ship's prow throwing a huge flag of shadow across a cliff, a forbidding wall of masonry half a mile above us: the views never stop coming.
