artillery-works

Updated: May 1, 2025

Not far from me to the left I saw the vast Tophana barracks of the Cannoniers, and the Artillery-works, after long reluctance and delay, take wing together; and three minutes later, down by the water, the barrack of the Bombardiers and the Military School together, grandly, grandly; and then, to the right, in the valley of Kassim, the Arsenal: these occupying the sky like smoky suns, and shedding a glaring day over many a mile of sea and land; I saw the two lines of ruddier flaring where the barge-bridge and the raft-bridge over the Golden Horn made haste to burn; and all that vastness burned with haste, quicker and quicker to fervour to fury to unanimous rabies: and when its red roaring stormed the infinite, and the might of its glowing heart was Gravitation, Being, Sensation, and I its compliant wife then my head nodded, and with crooked lips I sighed as it were my last sigh, and tumbled, weak and drunken, upon my face.

M. P. (Matthew Phipps) Shiel - The Purple Cloud