Lux Crucis [antikvár]

LUX CRUCIS A TALE OF THE GREAT APOSTLE I GffiSAREA The city was awakening to life. On the fiat tops of the low houses, in the northwesterly and more populous portion, figures began to appear, creeping, one by one, through the openings upon the roofs. They spread rugs of sheepskin or of tapestry near the stone copings of their dwellings, and silently knelt in prayer. The sun had risen above the line of hills to the northeast, and its beams gilded softly the neighboring eminences, touching with shafts of gold the summit of the Román theatre and the columns of the new aréna beyond the barracks of the Román soldiers. Afar in the east a fragment of the desert, a thin peninsula from the arid wastes of Arabia, lay a mass of white sand in the awakening light, while to the west the sea was quiet under the splendor of a tropic morning, reflecting from its green depths the shadows of the Román galleys at anchor in the harbor. Immediately south of the palace, the principal and most imposing building within the view, its fagade turnéd towards the sea and fronting upon an open court in which was erected a shaft of marble surmounted by a Román eagle, a long, low building was still quiet under i