Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page A

mountainside, but otherwise startling in their variety, square and conical, simply stolid and highly decorated, with turrets, withslate cones, with small lancet windows glinting like eyes, with galleries and turrets, with encrustations of ivy and other creeping life-forms. Many of these turrets appeared to be either unfinished or partly demolished, it was not always easy to say which, and the bright patches of colour of the workers’ vests could be seen moving along these high ledges and opened rooftops. As they rode up the causeway which ascended the Mount or Mound a thin sound of cheering and welcome could be heard from high above them, and fruit and flowers were jubilantly thrown under their advancing feet.
    They rode in between two great gate-towers, not, as the Lady Roseace had prefigured it to herself, into a central courtyard, but into a kind of dark tunnel, between walls which might be the sides of buildings or might be solid rocks, and which wound its way onward into the dark bowels of the place, lit occasionally by shafts of light in the gloom from high loopholes, and occasionally, at the darkest points, by lanterns hanging on smoke-blackened hooks from the stone. When they finally emerged they were in a well-like confine, with layer upon layer of dwellings towering above them, one corridor upon another, a Baroque balcony abutting a Gothic cloister, a series of classical windows, in elegantly diminishing proportions as they rose higher, under an unfinished thatched roof that might have suited a mediaeval byre. Some of the windows shone with myriad coloured lights, and some were gaping sockets with cracked arches. The sky was far, far away, it seemed to the Lady Roseace at that moment of arrival, and an intense blue, as the sky is when it is far, far away, scratched and scribbled on by the fingers and teeth, the stumps and domed skulls of the roofline.
The Living Quarters
    Culvert led the Lady Roseace into the living quarters prepared for her. They travelled along many passages, through many doors and arches, up many flights of stairs and down almost as many, it seemed, so that she was quite amazed by their intricacy. Her door was hidden behind an embroidered hanging on a wall in a long gallery. She could not see what was depicted on the hanging, for the light was flickering and fitful, but had the impression of many heaped limbs energetically writhing, of spherical breasts pointing skywards and of watermelons, it seemed, bursting open on greensward.
    Inside, all was rosy light. At first the Lady Roseace believed that she was in an internal chamber bathed in firelight, and then she saw thatshe was in a boudoir whose elegant windows were covered with a veil of translucent rosy silk, through which the sunlight poured. The room was sparsely furnished—there was an inlaid escritoire in rosewood, and a prie-dieu in the same wood upholstered in rose-coloured velvet, the most softly comfortable kneeling place possible to imagine. The rest of the furnishings were in a more oriental style, low divans, inlaid with ivory, spread with silk cushions of every size and shape, soft silken carpets woven with Persian roses and pinks and crimson-tipped daisies, huge soft floating daybeds, inviting languor, and hung with what appeared in that light to be flesh-coloured sealskins and cashmere shawls and rosy fox-furs. She ran through into the bed-chamber, which had a high huge bed like a galleon, hung about with richly embroidered silken curtains and floating with muslins and nets. Everywhere on little tables and chests were fantastically luminous bottles and flasks, breathing soft perfumes of flowers and musks. A body—many bodies—might vanish entirely in the soft cushionings and quiltings of that secret bed.
    The Lady Roseace walked from room to room, exclaiming and touching, fingering silks and ivories, tortoise-shells and lustres, satins and furs and feathers. When she drew back the silk curtain from the window and let in the