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He had passed through his momentary enthusiasm and lay at full length upon the couch, making circles, parabolas, and ellipses of fine white smoke, while he fixed his gaze upon the frieze of the wall, as if he were counting the architraves.
It is all unaccountable, unbelievable, the ghost of the dream of a dream, yet here it is, surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon, neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of Gerasa the Golden.
If the "scaena" is to have three stories, let the uppermost parapet be half the height of the intermediate one, the columns at the top one fourth less high than the intermediate, and the architraves and coronae of these columns one fifth of their height as before.
The building afforded little to interest a stranger, had I been disposed to consider it attentively; the sides of the quadrangle were of various architecture, and with their stone-shafted latticed windows, projecting turrets, and massive architraves, resembled the inside of a convent, or of one of the older and less splendid colleges of Oxford.
There was no difficulty at all in identifying the royal palace; for whereas most of the other dwellings in the valley were indicated merely by a more or less elaborately sculptured doorway hewn out of the living rock, the abode of Queen Bimbane measured judging by the eye alone at least five hundred feet long by sixty feet high, the whole surface of which was sculptured into the form of a house front, consisting of a doorway with window openings on either side of it, and, above that, two other tiers of window openings giving upon wide projecting balconies, the whole very elaborately decorated with mouldings, balusters, architraves, pediments, columns, entablatures, and other architectural features, in a style quite strange to me, yet very handsome and impressive, and representing, I should say, the life's work of several hundred masons.
To the right hand and to the left towered mighty constellations, that by self-repetitions and answers from afar, that by counter-positions, built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose archways horizontal, upright rested, rose at altitudes, by spans that seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measure were the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates.
But meanwhile the waxing flood, swollen from every moorland hollow and from every spouting crag, had dashed away all icy fetters, and was rolling gloriously. Under white fantastic arches, and long tunnels freaked and fretted, and between pellucid pillars jagged with nodding architraves, the red impetuous torrent rushed, and the brown foam whirled and flashed.
The curved architraves rise at each extremity like two menacing horns, pointing upward toward the far-off blue canopy of the star-spangled sky, as if they would communicate to the gods the knowledge they have acquired in the depths of their foundations from the earth, full of sepulchres and death, which surrounds them.
Columns, architraves, friezes, and the various categories of actual stone and brick work, occurred to them merely as so much line and curve, applicable to the surface of their buildings, with not more reference to their architecture than a fresco or an arras.
But interesting as they are in plan and the application of ornament, their main beauty lies in their details, in the union of chiselled plaster with the delicate mosaic work of niches and revêtements, the web-like arabesques of the upper walls and the bold, almost Gothic sculpture of the cedar architraves and corbels supporting them.
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