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So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
The high, deeply recessed doorways, with engaged columns or fluted pilasters supporting handsome entablatures or pediments, and beautifully paneled doors, often with a semicircular fanlight above, were characteristic of most Philadelphia entrances.
In our rambles in search of a place to pitch the tent, we entered a superb orange-orchard, the foliage of which made a perpetual twilight. Many of the trunks were two feet in diameter. The houses are mostly of one story, and the materials are almost wholly borrowed from the ancient city. Pillars, capitals, fragments of cornices and entablatures abound.
The ship was brought to earth and secured exactly at six o'clock, at a distance of some eight or nine miles from the sea, and the travellers then found themselves surrounded on all sides by gigantic ruined walls, arches, columns, erect and overturned, huge fragments of pediments, shattered entablatures, ruined capitals, splintered pedestals, and crumbling mutilated statues of men and animals, all of colossal proportions, the buildings being of a massive but ornate and imposing style of architecture, quite unknown to civilisation.
There was no difficulty at all in identifying the royal palace; for whereas most of the other dwellings in the valley were indicated merely by a more or less elaborately sculptured doorway hewn out of the living rock, the abode of Queen Bimbane measured judging by the eye alone at least five hundred feet long by sixty feet high, the whole surface of which was sculptured into the form of a house front, consisting of a doorway with window openings on either side of it, and, above that, two other tiers of window openings giving upon wide projecting balconies, the whole very elaborately decorated with mouldings, balusters, architraves, pediments, columns, entablatures, and other architectural features, in a style quite strange to me, yet very handsome and impressive, and representing, I should say, the life's work of several hundred masons.
They make bunches of flowers, from flakes and wires of silver, that counterfeit the delicate creations the frost weaves upon a windowpane; and we were shown a miniature silver temple whose fluted columns, whose Corinthian capitals and rich entablatures, whose spire, statues, bells, and ornate lavishness of sculpture were wrought in polished silver, and with such matchless art that every detail was a fascinating study and the finished edifice a wonder of beauty.
In short, in all these quaint entablatures some pithy sarcasm was symbolically conveyed; only over the mantel piece was the design graver and more touching.
Some twenty minutes later the party reached the outskirts of the ruined city, and found themselves confronted by enormous masses of masonry, consisting of walls, some of which still remained erect, although for the most part they had sunk into shapeless, overgrown masses of ruin, arches, columns, erect and prostrate, fragmentary pediments, shattered entablatures, dislodged capitals, crumbling pedestals, and mutilated statues of men and animals, all of colossal proportions; the buildings and portions of buildings all being of an immensely massive yet ornate and imposing style of architecture quite unknown to the travellers.
Soon the head of the procession entered the pylon and the bugles and the drums sounded with a din which, repeated by the echoes, drove the sleeping ibises from the entablatures. The bearers stopped at the gate in the façade between the two pavilions; slaves brought a footstool with several steps and placed it by the side of the litter.
It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining the approach to the master of the gods!
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