seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.

I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wandering from the

subject. I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness

of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost

countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the

thing, and so where is the use? One family built the whole edifice, and

have got money left. There is where the mystery lies. We had an idea at

first that only a mint could have survived the expense.

These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, darkest,

solidest houses one can imagine. Each one might "laugh a siege to

scorn." A hundred feet front and a hundred high is about the style, and

you go up three flights of stairs before you begin to come upon signs of

occupancy. Everything is stone, and stone of the heaviest--floors,

stairways, mantels, benches--everything. The walls are four to five feet

thick. The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as

crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and

look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your

head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend

almost together. You feel as if you were at the bottom of some

tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you. You wind in and out

and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of

the points of the compass than if you were a blind man. You can never

persuade yourself that these are actually streets, and the frowning,

dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful,

186

The Innocents Abroad