How Inconceivably Hateful Is Such A Leave-Taking, And
All That Follows After!
To picture a fair young body, that divine
instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now
loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, into some
common festering pit of abominations.
. . . The Northern type - a mighty
bond, again; a tie of blood, this time, between our race and those
rulers of the South, whose exploits in this land of orange and myrtle
surpassed the dreamings of romance.
Strange to reflect that, without the ephemeral friendship of that
evening, Messina of to-day might have represented to my mind a mere
spectacle, the hecatomb of its inhabitants extorting little more than a
conventional sigh. So it is. The human heart has been constructed on
somewhat ungenerous lines. Moralists, if any still exist on earth, may
generalize with eloquence from the masses, but our poets have long ago
succumbed to the pathos of single happenings; the very angels of Heaven,
they say, take more joy in one sinner that repenteth than in a hundred
righteous, which, duly apprehended, is only an application of the same
illiberal principle.
A rope of bed-sheets knotted together dangled from one of the upper
windows, its end swaying in mid-air at the height of the second floor.
Many of them do, at Messina: a desperate expedient of escape. Some pots
of geranium and cactus, sadly flowering, adorned the other windows,
whose glass panes were unbroken. But for the ominous sunlight pouring
through them from within, the building looked fairly intact on this
outer side. Its ponderous gateway, however, through which I had hoped to
enter, was choked up by internal debris, and I was obliged to climb,
with some little trouble, to the rear of the house.
If a titanic blade had sheared through the palazzo lengthwise, the
thing could not have been done more neatly. The whole interior had gone
down, save a portion of the rooms abutting on the street-front; these
were literally cut in half, so as to display an ideal section of
domestic architecture. The house with its inmates and all it contained
was lying among the high-piled wreckage within, under my feet; masonry
mostly - entire fragments of wall interspersed with crumbling mortar and
convulsed iron girders that writhed over the surface or plunged sullenly
into the depths; fetid rents and gullies in between, their flanks
affording glimpses of broken vases, candelabras, hats, bottles,
birdcages, writing-books, brass pipes, sofas, picture-frames,
tablecloths, and all the paltry paraphernalia of everyday life. No
attempt at stratification, horizontal, vertical, or inclined; it was as
if the objects had been thrown up by some playful volcano and allowed to
settle where they pleased. Two immense chiselled blocks of stone - one
lying prone at the bottom of a miniature ravine, the other proudly
erect, like a Druidical monument, in the upper regions - reminded me of
the existence of a staircase, a diabolical staircase.
Looking upwards, I endeavoured to reconstruct the habits of the inmates,
but found it impossible, the section that remained being too shallow.
Sky-blue seems to have been their favourite colour.
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