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.