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A bunch of wild-flowers and grasses, which Cornelia had gathered that morning, and Sophie had arranged, stood on the mantel-piece. There were four or five pictures one, a bass-relief of Endymion, deep asleep, yet conscious in his dream that the moon is peeping shyly over his polished shoulder, had been copied from a famous original by Sophie herself.
"But I cannot translate the bass-relief on the bronze," he added. "That represents Lieutenant Waghorn embarking with the mails in an open boat at Suez, an incident that actually occurred.
Over the portal on the eastern facade of the Watt P'hra Keau is a bass-relief representing the Last Judgment, in which are figures of a devil with a pig's head dragging the wicked to hell, and an angel weighing mankind in a pair of scales. He is called Suchus, and they feed him with meat and corn and wine, the contributions of strangers.
From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace is planted with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-relief commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of the cross.
Among the loose slabs of marble and fragments of pottery that turned up with the promiscuous rubbish every day, we sometimes found surfaces of stone bearing Siamese or Cambodian inscriptions; others with grotesque figures in bass-relief, taken from the mythology of the Hindoos.
From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace is planted with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-relief commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of the cross.
Three other statues of Antinoues, together with a bust, and an excellent bass-relief, in which he is represented, yet remain to be placed. The god of wine is here represented standing, and entirely naked. He is leaning carelessly with his left arm on the trunk of an elm, round which winds a grape-vine.
The facade of the house on the Rue Fortunee, now the Rue Balzac, was also to be embellished, and the central pavilion made to represent the novelist's apotheosis, with a monumental bass-relief and a niche. Only a small portion of these alterations was completed.
They made sure that he was nowhere about the church, and then started together down the terraces. At the second or third station below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protected the bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees.
At the first glance, its venerable aspect, vast proportions, and dignity of outline, do not sufficiently seize upon the imagination; but, as the eye travels over the elaborate façade, formed by successive galleries supported by truncated pillars, these galleries in their turn resting on clustered columns of richest sculpture forming the triple portals the fine inlaid work, statues, bass-relief, arabesques of fruit, foliage, and quaint animals the dome, and, above all, the campanile light and airy as a dream, springing upward on open arches where the sun burns hotly the eye comes to understand what a glorious Gothic monument it is.
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