THE VISION OF A CITY
At the hour when, urged by an exalted foreboding, such a man as I, wifeless and childless, reaches the level of the setting sun; as he attains the mountain’s crest high above the earth and its people, he sees the mysterious representation of a splendid city hanging enormous in the sky. It is a city of temples.
In modern cities we see the streets and the different quarters crowd and center about various markets and exchanges, schools and municipal buildings, whose high pinnacles and distributed masses stand out above the uniform roofs; but here the poised image of an eternal city, built by the evening in the form of a triple mountain, discloses not a single earthly detail, and shows nothing in the infinite ramification of its construction and the type of its architecture which is not appropriate to the sublime service it renders, although accomplished without preparation or practise.
And as the citizen of a kingdom, whose road leads to the capital, seeks to understand the plan of the immense place; sothe contemplative, gazing at Jerusalem, fearing to enter it with soiled sandals, studies the interpretation of its laws, and the conditions of a sojourn there. Not a nave, not a single plan of cupola or portico, but responds to the observances of a cult; not a movement or a detail of stairs and terraces is disregarded in the development of ceremony. The moats of towers, the superimposition of walls, the basilicas, circuses, and reservoirs,—and even the tree-tops in the square gardens,—are molded of the same snow; and the violet tinge of their shadows is perhaps only such a color of mourning as irreparable distance adds.
Thus one evening a solitary city appeared for an instant before me.