He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later,
when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole
chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.
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