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. The kitchen was
easily discernible, the hearth with its store of charcoal underneath,
copper vessels hanging in a neat row overhead, and an open cupboard full
of household goods; a neighbouring room (the communicating doors were
all gone), with lace window-curtains, a table, lamp, and book, and a
bedstead toppling over the abyss; another one, carpeted and hung with
pictures and a large faded mirror, below which ran a row of shelves that
groaned under a multitudinous collection of phials and bottles.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 359 of 488
Words from 96317 to 96628
of 131203
