Guilds of gigantic singers gather, wearing clothes and bearing banners as dazzling as light from the summits. On platforms in passes, Rolands sound their valor. On footbridges spanning abysses and rooftops of inns, the ardent sky ignites flagpoles. The collapse of old apotheoses joins heaven to earth, fields where seraphic centauresses gambol and dance between avalanches. A sea freighted with orphic fleets and rumbling pearls and precious conches unfolds above the highest peaks, disturbed by Venus’ perpetual birth—a sea that sometimes darkens with fatal flashes. Harvested flowers as big as guns and goblets are lowing on the hillsides. Parades of Mabs climb the ravine in red and opaline dresses. Up above, their feet in the falls and brambles, stags suckle Diana’s breasts. Suburban Bacchantes sob, the moon burns and bawls. Venus visits the caves of blacksmiths and hermits. Groups of belfries sing the people’s ideas. Unfamiliar music escapes from castles of bone. All the old mythologies gambol and dance, and urges, like elk, stampede through the streets. The Paradise of storms collapses. Savages dance ceaselessly at the feast of night. And, once, I even descended into the flow of a Baghdad boulevard where groups were singing joyously of new work, blown by a thick breeze, moving around but unable to elude the fabulous ghosts of the mountains where we must have met.
What fine arms and hour will return this region to me, whence my slumbers and slightest movements come?
Pathetic brother! What wretched sleepless nights he caused! “I had little passion for this undertaking. I played to his weaknesses. If we returned to exile, to slavery, I would be to blame.” He believed, strangely, I was both jinxed and innocent. His reasons were disturbing.
I responded by snickering at this satanic doctor, and fleeing out the window. Beyond a countryside singing with strains of singular music, I created ghosts of future, nocturnal luxury.
After this vaguely hygienic distraction, I would relax on my pallet. And, nearly every night, just as I had fallen asleep, this poor brother would rise, mouth dry, eyes bulging—just as he’d dreamed—and drag me into the next room while screaming his idiotic sorrowful dream.
Essentially, sincerely, I had taken it upon myself to return him to his primitive, sun-worshipping state—and we wandered, sustained by wine from cellars and the road’s dry bread—as I impatiently sought means and ends.
The official acropolis surpasses our most colossal conceptions of modern barbarity. Impossible to adequately describe the flat daylight produced by this immutably gray sky, the imperial sheen of the edifices, and the eternal snow on the ground. With a singular taste for enormity, they reproduced all the marvels of classical architecture. I attend painting expositions in places twenty times larger than Hampton Court. And what paintings! A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar built the staircases of the government buildings; the underlings I was able to see are already haughtier than Brahmins, and I trembled as guards and construction foremen passed outside the colossi. As the buildings were sited along squares, closed courtyards and terraces within, traffic has been shut out. The parks are displays of nature at its most primitive, artfully laid out. Some of the upper parts of town are inexplicable: a boatless arm of the sea unrolls its blue sleeve of delicate hail between piers loaded with giant candelabras. A short bridge leads to a postern directly beneath the dome of Sainte-Chapelle. This dome is an artistic steel frame roughly fifteen thousand feet wide.
From certain points on the copper footbridges, platforms, and staircases that wind through the markets and around pillars, I thought I could judge the depth of the city! One marvel I couldn’t reconcile: are the city’s other regions above or beneath the level of the acropolis? Reconnaissance is impossible for the tourist of today.
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