Monday, 30 November 2009

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

They ran for about three miles upon a broad macadamized avenue, laid
straight as an arrow's flight through the forest; and then the sound
of the sea came to them, and before them was a mighty granite pile,
looming grim in the twilight, with a draw-bridge and moat, and four
great castellated towers.

Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland





































Monday, 23 November 2009

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mounains by Isabella L. Bird

On either side of the Truckee great sierras rose like walls, castellated, embattled, rifted, skirted and crowned with pines of enormous size, the walls now and then breaking apart to show some snow-slashed peak rising into a heaven of intense, unclouded, sunny blue.

***

They were more brilliant than those incredible colors in which painters array the fiery hills of Moab and the Desert, and one could not believe them for ever uninhabited, for on them rose, as in the East, the similitude of stately fortresses, not the gray castellated towers of feudal Europe, but gay, massive, Saracenic architecture, the outgrowth of the solid rock.

Briançon, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France