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Updated: June 17, 2025
As she approached her destination, the cab passed by merely crossing a road from a spacious and beautiful Park, with its surrounding houses topped by statues and cupolas, to a row of cottages, hard by a stinking ditch miscalled a canal. The city of contrasts: north and south, east and west, the city of social contrasts.
A Frenchman dubs it a city of chalets, and recommends the architects of Paris to seek there the most charming models for kiosks, verandas, turrets, cupolas, etc. The humblest suburban and rural abodes he pronounces full of the picturesque. They appear to be much in the Swiss style, so natural to an alpine region.
Below them the hill fell away so abruptly that the roofs of the nearest houses were almost at their feet; and beyond these the city tumbled raggedly down to meet the bay in a confused, vague mass of roofs, cornices, cupolas, and chimneys, blurred and indistinct in the twilight, but here and there pierced by a new-lighted street lamp. Then came the bay.
"It is shameful, downright shameful," the Professor was repeating. "Overturned towers, crumbling citadels, cupolas fallen in, broken pillars, mutilated colossi, prows of vessels, thighs of monsters, bones of titans, this mass, impassable with its ridges and gullies, seemed the embodiment of everything huge and tragic. So clear were the distances...."
Here is the church built by the first Crusaders; there the mighty mosque of Suleiman on the site of the Temple; far away on a projecting ridge the great building known as the Tomb of Moses; on the right beyond the houses rise the towers on the Roman walls; the Pool of Bethsaida lies in the hollow; in the center are the cupolas of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Yet she seemed to herself to have clearer eyes than before; her years of travel had taught her to observe, the best gift that traveling can bestow. She saw new beauties in the gardens and the queer-shaped porches over the front doors, and noticed particularly the cupolas of one or two barns that were clear and sharp in their good outlines.
The palace must be joined together by a bridge of pure crystal. On each side of the bridge there must be growing trees, having golden and silver apples, and with birds of Paradise among the branches. At the right of the bridge there must be a church, with five golden cupolas; in this church your son shall be wedded to my daughter, and we will keep the wedding festivities in the new castle.
As these lofty mounds of earth have all been carried up from beneath the surface, a cave of corresponding dimensions is necessarily scooped out below, and here, under the multitude of miniature cupolas and pinnacles which canopy it above, the termites hollow out the royal chamber for their queen, with spacious nurseries surrounding it on all sides; and all are connected by arched galleries, long passages, and doorways of the most intricate and elaborate construction.
So the Identical burned on the head of Shagpat as in wrath, and with exceeding splendour of attraction, three nights and three days; and the fishes of the sea shoaled to the sea's surface and stared at it, and the fowls of the air congregated about the fury of the light with screams and mad flutters, till the streets and mosques and minarets and bright domes and roofs and cupolas of the City of Shagpat were blackened with scorched feathers of the vulture and the eagle and the rook and the raven and the hawk, and other birds, sacred and obscene; so was the triumph of Shagpat made manifest to men and the end of the world by the burning of the Identical three days and three nights.
Yefrem lived three-quarters of a mile from Akim's inn in a little house close to the priest's, near the solitary church with five cupolas which had been recently built by the heirs of a rich merchant in accordance with the latter's will. Yefrem said nothing to Akim all the way; he merely shook his head from time to time and uttered such ejaculations as "Dear, dear!" and "Upon my soul!"
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