[The Innocents Abroad Part 3 of 6 by Mark Twain]@TWC D-Link bookThe Innocents Abroad Part 3 of 6 CHAPTER XXX 4/18
I honestly believe a good majority of them are a hundred feet high! And the solid brick walls are seven feet through.
You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first" floor.
No, not nine, but there or thereabouts.
There is a little bird-cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up, up, among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always somebody looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking out from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people that look a little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till the folks in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly tall martin-box than any thing else.
The perspective of one of these narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the heavens--a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan details to see. ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED. Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an American city of one hundred and fifty thousand.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|