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Updated: May 25, 2025
He knew also that if they lay close and waited they were likely to hear what was worth hearing. The boy was in a dense mat of shrubbery. To his right was Obed and to his left were the Ring Tailed Panther and Urrea. He saw that the patio was faced on three sides by piazzas or porticos, from which wide doors opened into the house. He heard the music now as clearly as if it were at his side.
On the slender minarets sat many a pair of storks, reposing after their long journey; the whole immense flock had fixed themselves, nest by nest, amidst the mighty pillars and broken porticos of temples and forgotten edifices. The date tree elevated to a great height its broad leafy roof, as if it wished to form a shelter from the sun.
A ragged line of ghastly ruins, porticos without temples, and temples without porticos, their noble vaultings yawning like caverns in the open day, was seen bounding its farther edge. Its floor was a rectangular expanse of shapeless swellings and yawning pits.
This is a large square, surrounded by lofty porticos of fluted columns, some broken, some entire, their entablatures strewed under them. The temple of Jupiter, of Venus, and another temple, the Tribunal, and the Hall of Public Justice, with their forest of lofty columns, surround the Forum. At the upper end, supported on an elevated platform, stands the temple of Jupiter.
The use of huge blocks of stone, not only in platforms, but in the buildings themselves, in the shafts of pillars, the antae of porticos, the jambs of doorways, occasionally in roofs, and perhaps in epistylia, produced the same impression of power, and the same feeling of personal insignificance in the beholder, which is commonly effected by great size in the edifice, and particularly by height.
Nothing was left of all the tall pillared buildings, the friezes and the porticos, the altar, the bay-tree and the bodies nothing but the pile of logs which vomited a rolling cloud of flame and smoke into the sky. The moon was still shining calmly, and the sky was softer and greener. On the ground there were hundreds of dead and dying men; the dying were groaning in their agony.
Its porticos were supported upon the hands of colossal statues of women, carved out of white marble with exquisite art and beauty. Shade trees of a feathery foliage, like plumes of finest moss, guarded the entrance and afforded homes for brilliant-plumaged birds that flew about the porticos and alighted on the hands and shoulders of the ladies without fear.
If we consider that the city and suburbs of Rome, in the reign of Claudius, contained about seven millions of inhabitants, a number equal at least to the sum total of all the souls in England; that great part of antient Rome was allotted to temples, porticos, basilicae, theatres, thermae, circi, public and private walks and gardens, where very few, if any, of this great number lodged; that by far the greater part of those inhabitants were slaves and poor people, who did not enjoy the conveniencies of life; and that the use of linen was scarce known; we must naturally conclude they were strangely crouded together, and that in general they were a very frowzy generation.
This scene extends as far as the eye can reach. Still ascending I attained the brow of the mountain, and had nothing but the fortress of Belvedere, and two or three open porticos above me. On this elevated situation, I found several walks of trellis- work, clothed with luxuriant vines, that produce to my certain knowledge the most delicious clusters.
Their conversation was about heaven; and one of them who knew something respecting it, said, "In heaven there are wonderful things, such as no one can believe unless he has seen them: there are paradisiacal gardens, magnificent palaces constructed according to the rules of architecture, because the work of the art itself, resplendent with gold; in the front of which are columns of silver; and on the columns heavenly forms made of precious stones; also houses of jasper and sapphire, in the front of which are stately porticos, through which the angels enter; and within the houses handsome furniture, which no art or words can describe.
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