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Upon a level with the ground-floor of the colonnades, and opening into them, are small apartments formed in the walls, having the appearance of dungeons: these have remained the property of the mosque, while the houses above them belong to private individuals. They are let out to watermen, who deposit in them the Zemzem jars; or to less opulent hadjys, who wish to live in the mosque.
It is probably one of the largest and finest monuments of Hindoo art in existence, covering in all its divisions, courts, shrines, colonnades, and tanks, twenty acres of ground. It has nine lofty tower-like gates of entrance and exit, each one of which has the effect of forming an individual pagoda.
In my bunch of grass there were streets, cross roads, public squares, entire cities. At the bottom of it, I distinguished a great dark patch where the shoots of the previous spring were decaying sadly, then slender stalks were growing up, stretching out, bending into a multitude of elegant forms, and producing frail colonnades, churches, virgin forests.
Beaumanoir was one of those Palladian palaces, vast and ornate, such as the genius of Kent and Campbell delighted in at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Placed on a noble elevation, yet screened from the northern blast, its sumptuous front, connected with its far-spreading wings by Corinthian colonnades, was the boast and pride of the midland counties.
The huge battlemented walls, encircling the double mounts of Zion and Moriah the vast huddle of white houses, covering hill and hollow with their flat roofs and standing so close together that the streets were hidden among them the towers, the colonnades, the terraces the dark bulk of the Roman castle the marble pillars and glittering roof of the Temple in its broad court on the hilltop it was a city of stone and ivory and gold, rising clear against the soft saffron and rose and violet of the sunset sky.
On one side only of the wide, unroofed space, one of the colonnades that surrounded it threw a narrow shade, hardly a span wide; and she would not go there, for under it stood several beds on which lay pilgrims who, here in the very dwelling of the divinity, hoped to be visited with dreams which might give them an insight into futurity.
The great doors of the pylon were wide open, and afforded a view into the forecourt of the sanctuary, paved with polished squares of stone, and surrounded on three sides with colonnades. The walls and architraves, the pillars and the fluted cornice, which slightly curved in over the court, were gorgeous with many colored figures and painted decorations.
About it were neglected houses; not a sign of festivity was apparent; windows hung open carelessly; the hangings in colonnades were stripped away entirely or whipped loose from the fastenings and abandoned to the winds. Numbers of dwellings appeared to have been sacked; others were so closely barred and fortified that their exteriors appeared as inhospitable as jails.
"I thought you had some idea of going to the Museum of Artillery this afternoon, to see whether or not you approved of the French guns." Mr. Cockayne laughed at the sarcasm, and again gave Sophonisba his arm, and went under the colonnades of the Rue de Rivoli, wondering, by the way, why people stared at him in his plaid suit, and at his daughter in her brown hat and blue veil. Mrs.
I gave a lingering look at the lovely rooms I was leaving, which were now devoid of our trunks and little personal trinkets, nodded a farewell to our particular valet, who was probably thinking already of our successors, descended l'Escalier d'honneur, and passed through the beautiful Galerie des Gardes to the colonnades, where the chars-a-bancs were ready waiting to carry us to the station.
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