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Updated: May 22, 2025
Its solitude then became desolation, the darkness of its stones a blackness that was tragic, its ruin more than a suggestion, the decisive picture of despair. At its base was a line of half-discovered window-spaces, the lower parts of which had become long since the prey of the waves.
I built my house of elm-logs, thirty-six feet long by twenty-four feet wide, which I divided into three rooms on the ground-floor, besides an entrance-hall and staircase, and three bed-rooms up stairs. I was very busy till October making the shingles,* roofing, cutting out the door and window-spaces, and hewing the logs down inside the house.
Above it were more window-spaces, fully visible, and flanking a high doorway, once, no doubt, connected with a staircase, but now giving upon mid-air. Formerly there had been another floor, but this had fallen into decay and disappeared, with the exception of one small and narrow chamber situated immediately over the doorway.
Dark faces peer through the narrow slits of bamboo window-spaces, but Makassar pride contains the elements of self-respect, and though the stranger attracts a certain amount of interest, no discourtesy mars the pleasure of exploration.
It returned and swept about the narrow streets, eddying at the corners, beating upon the palmwood doors, behind which the painted dancing-girls were cowering, cold under their pigments and their heavy jewels, their red hands trembling and clasping one another, clamouring about the minarets of the mosques on which the frightened doves were sheltering, shaking the fences that shut in the gazelles in their pleasaunce, tearing at the great statue of the Cardinal that faced it resolutely, holding up the double cross as if to exorcise it, battering upon the tall, white tower on whose summit Domini had first spoken with Androvsky, raging through the alleys of Count Anteoni's garden, the arcades of his villa, the window-spaces of the fumoir, from whose walls it tore down frantically the purple petals of the bougainvillea and dashed them, like enemies defeated, upon the quivering paths which were made of its own body.
They had long since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in their saddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. For three hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirking motions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards ahead Durrance saw a broken wall with window-spaces which let the sky through. "The fort," said he.
From the arches of the window-spaces hung old Moorish lamps of copper, fitted with small panes of dull jewelled glass, such as may be seen in venerable church windows. In a round copper brazier, set on one of the window-seats, incense twigs were drowsily burning and giving out thin, dwarf columns of scented smoke.
Leaping from its dark and crumbling walls the fisher-boys often plunged into the depths below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the gaping window-spaces to dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from its deserted apartments, through which, when rough weather was at hand, the screaming sea-birds flew. The waves played frivolously enough in its recesses.
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