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It had been built in the days of Ferdinand VII at the period when French architecture was running rife over the world , and had the appearance of a Gascon chateau . It was a long low house of two stories . Every room on the ground floor opened with long French windows to a terrace built to the edge of the plateau , where a fountain splashed its clear spring water into a stone basin , where gray stone urns stood on lichen-covered pillars amid flower-beds . Every room on the first floor had windows opening on a wide balcony which ran the length of the house and was protected from the rain and midday sun by the far-stretching eaves of the roof . The house was of gray stone , roofed with slabs of the same , such as peel off the slopes of the Pyrenees and slide one over the other to the valleys below . The pointed turrets at each corner were roofed with the small green tiles that the Moors loved . The winds and the snow and the rain had toned all Torre Garda down to a cool gray-green against which the four cypress trees on the terrace stood rigid like sentinels keeping eternal guard over the valley .