United States or Brazil ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Horses were ridden and driven in the Hippodrome, and feasts were held in the pleasure-houses of Canopus, with music and noisy mirth; in the public gardens round the Paneum cock-fighting and quail-fighting were as popular as ever, and eager was the betting in new gold or humble copper.
Twelve buildings—palaces, villas, pavilions, call them what you will—were now constructed for the special examination of the planets, and in consequence the whole of the island, whose limited area after all is exceeded by many an English park, was practically turned into one vast maritime residence, for all the Imperial pleasure-houses seem to have been connected with each other by means of viaducts or secret stair-ways.
What, then, was the marvel across the valley, what were the "lordly pleasure-houses" to whose creation and enlargement Moulay-Ismaël returned again and again amid the throes and violences of a nearly centenarian life? All the eastern end of the town was also torn down, and the ramparts were rebuilt.
And so he held on in pursuit of the black shadow, passing forsaken temples and lordly pleasure-houses, all marble tracery and fretwork, standing apart in what had once been noble gardens, sunken tanks all weed-grown and rank with slime, humbler dooryards and cots on whose hearthstones the fires for centuries had been cold his destination evidently the temple of the unspeakable Eye.
At a distance of six hundred paces from the shore of the 'Yang-tse-Kiang' is the wonderful Island of Chin-shan, or 'Golden Mountain. This island is covered with gardens and pleasure-houses. Art and nature have united their efforts to give it the most enchanting aspect.
It was no longer the place of palaces and pleasure-houses, of flowery gardens and leafy woods that I had seen it, but above it still gleamed the white snow-fields and shining peaks of Charchani and Pichu-Pichu, and between the two great white ranges still towered the vast, black, snow-crowned cone of Misti, the smoke-mountain, rising sheer in its lonely grandeur twelve thousand feet above the sloping plain on which the city lay.
And, O monarch, having reached that spot, Duryodhana commanded his men by thousands, saying, 'Let pleasure-houses be constructed soon. Thus commanded, those doers of the king's behests replying to the Kuru chief with the words, 'So be it, went towards the banks of the lake for constructing pleasure-houses.
An Arab geographer of the eleventh century says that there are over two hundred flourishing villages in the neighbourhood of Gafsa; and Edrisius, writing a century later, extols its prosperous suburbs, and pleasure-houses. Where are they now?
There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes when I cannot muster a fiddle.
But though the sun-baked clay of which the impatient Sultan built his pleasure-houses will not suffer comparison with the firm stones of Rome, "the high Roman fashion" is visible in the shape and outline of these ruins. What they are no one knows. Were these the vaulted granaries, or the subterranean reservoirs under the three miles of stabling which housed the twelve thousand horses?
Word Of The Day