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Updated: May 9, 2025
In this wise, in Pierre's mind there spread out the whole history of the popes, the most prodigious of all histories, showing fortune in every guise, the lowest, the most wretched, as well as the loftiest and most dazzling; whilst an obstinate determination to live enabled the papacy to survive everything conflagrations, massacres, and the downfall of many nations, for always did it remain militant and erect in the persons of its popes, that most extraordinary of all lines of absolute, conquering, and domineering sovereigns, every one of them even the puny and humble masters of the world, every one of them glorious with the imperishable glory of heaven when they were thus evoked in that ancient Vatican, where their spirits assuredly awoke at night and prowled about the endless galleries and spreading halls in that tomb-like silence whose quiver came no doubt from the light touch of their gliding steps over the marble slabs.
Along by the carriage and nearer to the entrance rolled the ponderous black vehicle, and out from its tomb-like depths were taken forth the men and women, that an hour before had been lying so helplessly on the benches at the Commissioner's office.
This was a wide, lofty chamber, hung with dripping stalactites, far below the level at which they began the descent. The floor was almost as flat and even as that of a modern dwelling. Here the cavern branched off in three or four directions, like the tentacles of a monster devilfish, the narrow passages leading no one knew whither in that tomb-like mountain.
Durtal wandered away to meditate in the Bishop's garden, where he had permission to walk whenever he pleased. The garden was perfectly still, with tomb-like avenues, pollard poplars, and trampled lawns half dead. There was not a flower, for the Cathedral killed everything under its shadow.
They could not even come to the decision, as Gordon wrote, "to abandon altogether and not care what happens." But all these minor points were merged in a great common national anxiety when month after month passed during the spring and summer of 1884, and not a single word issued from the tomb-like silence of Khartoum.
Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and airy so that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among the abodes of the living.
"How chilling! how tomb-like! Can it be that mortals are confined here, and live?" she mutters, incoherently. The stifling atmosphere is redolent of disease. "It straightens 'em down, sublimely to put 'em in here," says Mr. Glentworthy, laconically, lighting his lamp. "I hope to get old Saddlerock in here. Give him such a mellowing!"
Little by little the fire burnt low, the ruddy lights grew dim, the pale lights reappeared, and the encampment resumed its tomb-like appearance until the break of another day gave it a new aspect and caused Jonas Bellew to rise, yawn, shake the hoar-frost from his blanket, pack up his traps, and resume his journey.
The tomb-like erections, he said, were considered in the light of gods; the bones and ashes of departed Lamas having been pounded up together and deposited beneath them, together with such valuables as turquoises, Pushmeena, rupees, &c.
The same may be said of the next floor, which was devoted to stockbrokers' and companies offices, and was equally tomb-like and silent when he passed; the floor above that was a desert of empty rooms, which echoed to his footsteps night and morning, with here and there an oasis in the green sign of a mining secretary's office, with, however, the desolating announcement that it would only be "open for transfers from two to four on Saturdays."
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