engird

The floors of the gallery which engird the rotunda, and the winding stairs leading to them, are of iron.

Engird, en-gėrd′, v.t. to gird round.

It might no longer be the New York that I hear a lot of artists pine for, the desolate but dirt-cheap and fertile one of the 1970s where “the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square,” as Luc Sante so memorably described those years.

She cites, as witness to her word, The frowning Adriatic strand; The Cyclades which rocks engird, And noted Rhodus’ distant land; Propontis and unkindly Thrace, And Savage Pontus’ billowy race.

"Does not the chace," he would say, "now afford us equal pleasure? are not my dogs as swift, and these mountains as replete with game as those which engird my paternal residence."