Please help me to understand the following sentence from The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock.
A soft afternoon breeze, laden with the fragrance of distant deserts, blew through the tawny canyons beneath me, circulated amongst the ravines and foothills, and soared on eagles' wings across the first battlements of the escarpment
"The first battlements of the escarpment" puzzles me the most. There are no 'battlements' (no fortifying construction in sight judging by context). A very prolonged slope is present in the scene as a geological feature. I guess that the 'battlements' has some indirect, idiomatic (?) meaning here. Is this correct? It is difficult for me to perceive the literary beauty of the sentence without comprehending details. Adding that 'battlements' and 'escarpment' have (imho) very similar meaning.