The chamber walls were covered with
bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
Pages:
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365