The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 714 pages of information about The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain.

The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 714 pages of information about The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain.
so long.  The Temple of the Sun is nearly three hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty feet wide.  It had fifty-four columns around it, but only six are standing now—­the others lie broken at its base, a confused and picturesque heap.  The six columns are their bases, Corinthian capitals and entablature—­and six more shapely columns do not exist.  The columns and the entablature together are ninety feet high—­a prodigious altitude for shafts of stone to reach, truly—­and yet one only thinks of their beauty and symmetry when looking at them; the pillars look slender and delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate sculpture, looks like rich stucco-work.  But when you have gazed aloft till your eyes are weary, you glance at the great fragments of pillars among which you are standing, and find that they are eight feet through; and with them lie beautiful capitals apparently as large as a small cottage; and also single slabs of stone, superbly sculptured, that are four or five feet thick, and would completely cover the floor of any ordinary parlor.  You wonder where these monstrous things came from, and it takes some little time to satisfy yourself that the airy and graceful fabric that towers above your head is made up of their mates.  It seems too preposterous.

The Temple of Jupiter is a smaller ruin than the one I have been speaking of, and yet is immense.  It is in a tolerable state of preservation.  One row of nine columns stands almost uninjured.  They are sixty-five feet high and support a sort of porch or roof, which connects them with the roof of the building.  This porch-roof is composed of tremendous slabs of stone, which are so finely sculptured on the under side that the work looks like a fresco from below.  One or two of these slabs had fallen, and again I wondered if the gigantic masses of carved stone that lay about me were no larger than those above my head.  Within the temple, the ornamentation was elaborate and colossal.  What a wonder of architectural beauty and grandeur this edifice must have been when it was new!  And what a noble picture it and its statelier companion, with the chaos of mighty fragments scattered about them, yet makes in the moonlight!

I can not conceive how those immense blocks of stone were ever hauled from the quarries, or how they were ever raised to the dizzy heights they occupy in the temples.  And yet these sculptured blocks are trifles in size compared with the rough-hewn blocks that form the wide verandah or platform which surrounds the Great Temple.  One stretch of that platform, two hundred feet long, is composed of blocks of stone as large, and some of them larger, than a street-car.  They surmount a wall about ten or twelve feet high.  I thought those were large rocks, but they sank into insignificance compared with those which formed another section of the platform.  These were three in number, and I thought that each of them was about as long as three street cars placed end to end, though

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The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.