Cities

 

 

The official acropolis outdoes the most colossal conceptions of modern

barbarity: impossible to describe the opaque light produced by the

immutable gray sky, the imperial brightness of the buildings, and the

eternal snow on the ground. With a singular taste for enormity, all the

classical marvels of architecture have been reproduced, and I visit

exhibitions of paintings in premeses twenty times as vast as Hampton

Court. What painting! A Norwegan Nebuchadnezzar built the stairways of

the government buildings; even the subordinates I saw were already

prouder than ***, and I trembled at the aspect of the guardians of

colossi and the building supervisors. By grouping the buildings around

squares, courts and enclosed terraces, they have ousted the cabbies. The

parks present primitive nature cultivated with superb art, there are

parts of the upper town that are inexplicable: the arm of the sea,

without boats, rolls its sleet-blue waters between quays covered with

giant candelabra. A short bridge leads to a postern directly under the

dome of the Sainte-Chapelle. This dome is an artistic structure of steel

about fifteen thousand feet in diameter.

 

From certain points on the copper footbridges, on the platforms, on the

stairways that wind around the markets and the pilalrs, I thought I might

form an idea of the depth of the city! This is the prodigy I was unable

to discover: what are the levels of the other districts below and above

the acropolis? For the stranger of our day exploration is impossible. The

business district is a circus in a uniform style with arcaded galleries.

No shops are to be seen, but the snow of the roadway is trampled; a few

nabobs, as rare as pedestrians on Sunday morning in London, are making

their way toward a diamond diligence. A few red velvet divans: polar

deinks are served of which the price varies from eight hundred to eight

thousand rupees. At the thought of looking for thearers on this circus, I

say to myself that the shops must contain dramas quite dismal enough. I

suppose there is a police force; but the law must be so strange that I

give up trying to imagine what adventures can be like here.

 

The suburb, as elegant as a beautiful Paris street, is favored with air

like light. The democratic element counts a few hundred souls. There,

too, the houses do not follow each other; the suburb loses itself queerly

in the country, the "County," that fills the eternal west with forests

and prodigious plantations where gentlemen savages hunt their news by the

light they have invented.