Lord Alistair's Rebellion
Allen Upward
9781465664617
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Night clad the imperial city in a black robe stitched with fire. The misty river rolled in from the sea through its illuminated bridges with the subdued swish of some great snake writhing its way through hoops of gold. Out in the fog-haunted region between the bridges the movement of the red and green-eyed steam-tugs, clutching invisible barges and dragging them away into the darkness, seemed like a shadow-show in which grotesque demons were hunting the souls of men. The two banks of the river offered a contrast full of significance. Along the left bank white lamps that slit the dusk with the hard, bright glare of diamonds were strung like beads at measured spaces apart. A broad, smooth-paven road rattled with the wheels of traffic, and the long bend of the river revealed a sweep of stately buildings representing the power and splendour of a great civilization. Education, law, science, government, police, had their homes side by side along that mighty façade, which thus became an entablature on which the characters of civilization were legibly impressed. Beside the ancient universities of the law stood the headquarters of the vast machinery for the teaching of the populace—that is to say, for the taming of successive generations of barbarians. The power of wealth was expressed in luxurious hotels and club-houses, in the mansion of the noble and the estate-office of the millionaire. The revenues of empire flowed in and out through the gates of one majestic pile; from another the guardians of the social order waged war against the restless ranks of crime. Last in place towered the huge palace of the imperial Legislature, supreme over all. Across the river the low mass of the southern shore lay in obscurity. All that could be distinguished over there was a dark roof-line broken by a few tall, smokeless chimneys, rising above the water like the walls and towers of a beleaguered city encompassed by its moat. The solitary illumination on that side of the river was afforded by a high square building which broke the gloom from instant to instant with huge letters of yellow fire, spelling out uncouth, barbaric syllables in what might have been the jargon of some subterranean race of men. Seen across the river mist the tower flared out like those burning mosques beheld from afar by the voyager in the Underworld as he drew near to the city of Dis. All night the square, ugly minaret continued to flash its monstrous hieroglyphs upon the darkness, as though the dwellers on the southern shore were signalling a message from their camp. And from time to time, when the rattle of the wheels on the hither side stayed for a moment, there was borne across the water the low, sullen hum as of a vast multitude swarming in the narrow streets and stunted houses of the hidden region beyond.
