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Updated: June 26, 2025
Now when the two brothers came to the hill of glass, the knights and princes were all hard at it, riding their horses till they were all in a foam; but it was no good, by my troth; for as soon as ever the horses set foot on the hill, down they slipped, and there wasn't one who could get a yard or two up; and no wonder, for the hill was as smooth as a sheet of glass, and as steep as a house-wall.
Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before Columbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames for high building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street from house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet.
Few and quick were the words we were able to exchange, for the way jammed on the moment, and soon my men and horses were being pressed and jostled. Miriam was sheltered in an angle of house-wall. "Have they got the fisherman yet?" I asked. "No; but he is just outside the wall.
Civilians in new black suits, civilians more or less damaged, limping or one-eyed, did things that made them happy with a hammer and a nail. They whistled as they tapped, nailed up shutters that had hung for four years by one hinge, climbed about the roofs and fixed a tile or two where a hundred were needed, brought little ladders on borrowed wheelbarrows and set them against the house-wall.
But he was all right now, as he leaned against the house-wall, panting, and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief; he saw his hotel a little way down the street, and he did not feel anxious about it. "Gave you the slip after all," said a passer, who had apparently been interested in Lemuel's adventure. "Oh, I didn't want to catch it," said Lemuel.
After they had made sure that none had missed a chance to quench his thirst, they roughly marshalled us into some semblance of order and out into the street we trooped, where we found ourselves between two detachments of frontier soldiers, one filling the street ahead of us from house-wall to house-wall, the other similarly blocking the street behind us.
The street was filled from house-wall to house-wall with an immense mass of broken stone, brick, and other débris. The cause was not far to seek. Immediately upon the left rose one of the fabulously high buildings for which the ancient city had been famous.
The chief ingredient in this particular house-wall is the common brick, burnt earth, and but one step from the handfuls of clay of the ancestral mud hut, small in size and permeable to damp. Slowly, day by day, the walls grew tediously up, to a melody of tinkling trowels.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time.
Yawning in imitation, I passed with feigned listlessness to the terrace, went noiselessly along by the house-wall, and followed the wing to the end of the balustrade. I did not venture even to look toward the steps, but I could hear the maid talking and laughing coquettishly.
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