Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
For, whether it were some uncanny play of mind or very truth, it seemed to him that from the wide fireplace there did indeed come a faint ring of hoofs and clash of steel; the long cressets over them suddenly flickered smokingly, though no draft crossed their faces.
At intervals along the upper part of the walls were cressets of wrought iron in which to set torches, and above the dais were silver sconces for large wax candles. At intervals also were hooks of ornamental iron-work, from which to hang tapestries by their metal rings.
Then the Emperor rose to his feet unsteadily, like a man drunk with the forbidden juice; and when Kazim Sharif would have supported him, he flung aside his hands, and he stumbled, a man wounded to death, as it were, to the marble chamber where she lay. In that white chamber it was dusk, and they had lit the little cressets so that a very faint light fell upon her face.
Wayland uttered a jubilant low whistle and tumbled down the sand bank to his camp kit. The wind was at lull and the velvet air palpitating as a human pulse. The after-glow lay on the orange sands cresting all the ridges with cressets of flame. Wayland was riding bare backed. "When we sight them, I want you to drop back, sir! The Desert's got them. They haven't the resistance of dead fish left.
It was all alight from end to end with candles in cressets, and on the great round table at the further end where the company was playing basset, stood tall candlesticks amidst all the gold. I had not seen this great gallery before; and it was beyond everything, and far beyond Her Majesty's own great chamber. If I had thought the closet fine, this was a thousand times more.
We were soon in the long gallery leading to the Queen's apartments; but, instead of the darkness and gloom that pervaded it on the occasion of my last visit, all was in light. Cressets burned everywhere, and at every few yards stood a flambeau-bearer, his torch alight.
These lights were the power of Assyria, and Nineveh, and Egypt, and Rome, and Athens, and Byzantium: six other cressets stood ready there, but fire had not yet been laid to these. Back of all was a large blackboard with much figuring on it in red chalk. And here, too, was the black gentleman, who a year ago had given his blessing to Jurgen, for speaking civilly of the powers of darkness.
As they drew nearer Brian made out that this beacon was set on the tower of a high pile of masonry black against the sky, lit here and there by cressets, and it was plain that the Bird Daughter kept good watch since they had more than once been hailed in passing the islands.
The dim cell-lamp of the somewhat apocryphal Jocelin of Brakelond becomes in his hands a huge Drummond-light, shining over the Dark Ages like the naphtha-fed cressets over Pandemonium, proving, as he says in his own quaint way, that "England in the year 1200 was no dreamland, but a green, solid place, which grew corn and several other things; the sun shone on it; the vicissitudes of seasons and human fortunes were there; cloth was woven, ditches dug, fallow fields ploughed, and houses built."
The cressets, I saw, most of them, were of brass, not silver; the brocades, which were Portuguese, were a little faded here and there; and there was not near the show of gold and silver plate that I had expected. But of all the sights there, I think Her Majesty was the most melancholy. She was dressed very splendid; and her skirt was so stiff with bullion that it scarce fell in folds at all.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking