ABSTRACT
Stand with me for a moment, in this palace of the dead, upon a south-west balcony and overlook desolation rivaling. Pompeii and Messina, the desert and the sea. Dumb are the temple bells: white the bones of those who rang them; ruins yawn and doorways gape; here is a crazy wall unwilling to release its slender hold upon the hillside and sink into the adjoining wastes of dust, tinder and scorched-up grass; there is a street cut short by fallen masonry that chokes the grinning gap between two cactus-bordered lanes. It is all ruin or desolation — only the temples stand to carry on the shadow of the busy, seething life that once surged up and down those mountain sides — to them the all-important centre of an imagined never-ending circle of hopes and fears and length of days. Too pitiable all! Walk through the stricken town, and, if you have trod that awful modern Golgotha, Messina, you have some conception of the devastation and unutterable loneliness of Amber city.
