There was pause in the breath and the sound of breath in the pause. And then the coruscating white veil of cloud over the hill moved between the ends of the alley and reached to the far square; a journey had been made above and a journey was being made here upon the soil on which the feet were placed: the island was sailing in the river and he was sailing to the aroma of the island. Music flowed from a cabin decked in the cockeyed impression of graffiti in the proximity of a sidewalk; it trailed in the air like the smoke from the great funnels of a crawling steamship. He might have been the only human being upon this earth from the silence of the streets, the absence of fellow and the muteness of the mansions. The stolid calm of the streets and of the masts of joined houses told of a sly, fairy world bound to the lighted freedom of the sky. “The street was descending rapidly in the way tributaries descend to a river and I was going to tumble into the lap of the clouds that floated over this river.”
Above a broad, stately street etched out along the breast of this sailing island such that the hill stood above and the earth plunged below, a spectacle of clouds in the sky left the furious sun shining between the crevices of perpendicular buildings and throwing a part of itself upon the opposite sidewalk. The temptation to cross to the opposite side was strong, not only to escape for a while the horripilating blasts that tear through such a broad street from every direction at almost every time—placed as the flying island is to the rush of universal winds—but also for a close observation of the ornamentation of light upon the camber of grey tiled roofs, upon inverted flower pots with corner fleurs-de-lys that make the crown of many a coloured dormer door with a balcony, and on crenellations dyed in snuff that run along roof edges in imitation of turrets for a defended fortress. “I shall call this street I was in not by its proper name but simply Gracious Street; it affords the grace of the broad steps of museums, the fine grounds of universities and the retreated walls of an ancient seminary shielded by orchards, besides leafy lining maples and oaks with trunks that are hardened with the crust of epochs.” From the street, one sees the sweeping hill looking down in shades of orange and buff on a stormy day in autumn when rain falls in cordes but does not persist, although the clouds continue to churn gruesomely and prevent the reappearance of the sun.
It was indeed elevating and heady to walk into this world in the days following his own arrival in the city, to relent the steps at a corner with a little park in which a bench was dominated by a wall thickened with vinery, and to pass thence to another avenue apparently aligned with the one left behind in which the balcony on the loft of a house at the corner was topped by an outrageous mound that settled squarely and smugly as if nothing else was sufficiently apt to make the decoration. More people came into view but they were not enough to cause a loosening in the step as he might be prepared for from his previous outings in cities, the only pause coming from the red light at the other end that bespoke a friendliness in its stand. A fir seemed to stand in the middle of the path on the other side and stony anchored vessels teemed with a variety of petals at a short space from it. People ate behind glass walls and seemed to eat there always. Out where the walk led smoothly up to a view of the statue with wings at the foot of the hill and then descended to provide a vista of towers and open roads, he was conscious of flying in the air with few observers around to mark the flight, propelled as he was by the buoyancy of the sun and the settled luminescence burgeoning from the soil of the city. There it was: the elemental liveliness of sun and air such as the demanding spirit inside was long waiting to drown in, and the awareness of a necessary, distinctive, quaint, imperious, stylish relief for a city upon a masted, rigged, voluminous island; this revelation was one of the many apercus in the persisting, riveting corpus of air and space, and in the detonation of sound and soul, in this city. “And I still have not dwelled on the traits of the bewildering rare people, rare for their mix, flair, panache, caprice, circumstance, and simple denial of the absence of bewilderment!”
very descriptive