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Set within each of the eight sides, above the balcony, were colossal slabs of lapis lazuli, inset with graceful but unplaceable designs in scarlet and sapphire blue. There was the great divan on which mused Larry; two smaller ones, half a dozen low seats and chairs carved apparently of ivory and of dull soft gold.
As it grew lighter rapidly now, he could make out that the roughly thatched roof was merely stretched over a rough rocky nook in which the hot spring bubbled out of the mountain slope, and here a few rough slabs had been laid together, box-fashion, to retain the water and form the bath.
Last night I dreamed that the river was ink and I kept dipping into it and writing with a penstalk made of a young pine tree. I sliced great slabs of marble off the side of one of the White Mountains, the one you see when going to meeting, and wrote on those. Then I threw them all into the falls, not being good enough for Dr. Moses. Dick Carter had a splendid boy to stay over Sunday.
The mists were passing from the distant summits, curtain after curtain of gauze draping their heads for a moment and sweeping on. We made our camp between the granite slabs on the natural camping site that offered itself, and a shovel and an empty alcohol-can proclaimed that our predecessors of last year had done the same.
These slabs may be termed headstones, but they have a far different meaning from those that bear the name of the deceased with which we are most familiar, for when they have any marking on their faces, it is not a totem of the dead, but a symbol of the rain-cloud, which is connected with ancestor worship.
"Two centuries ago, thousands of human beings, full of life and activity, thronged those walls," he remarked. "All are gone, and of descendants they have left none. All, all have been victims to Spanish cruelty. Follow me." He moved on, and led us into several. Some had two and even three stories, and the floors of slabs of stone or slate still remained.
They are, for the most part, simple, thick slabs of white marble, with a triangular or pediment-shaped top, beneath which is sculptured in low relief the closing scene of the person commemorated, followed by a short inscription. The work is done in an artistic style worthy of the publicity its location gave it.
Some of these crystals are simply flat slabs with six sides, others are stars with six rods or spikes springing from the centre, others with six spikes each formed like a delicate fern.
Lying scattered about were the shattered fragments of the sculptured frieze of the temple; and, with infinite labour the camp of explorers succeeded in gathering together and arranging the slabs which are now deposited in this, the Phigaleian saloon.
The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored marble red, yellow, and green which, though terribly battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.
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