...of surveying

Everywhere the tall figure of the slender youth, in his close black dress and unornamental cap thickly cinctured with curls, might be seen passing along with commanding tread and bearing, controlling all around him like the sovereign spirit of the storm. Sometimes that shape appeared lofty against the sky, standing on a thread-like scaffolding, a blue abyss of air on each side, before and behind the skeleton erection of an unfinished palace, honeycombed with arches, and vast beams flung across as the divisions of state chambers, between voids that might turn the head of a cabin boy giddy. And here the monarch walked as fearlessly as an eagle hangs, poised above his eyrie. The eyes of his stern and swarthy subjects were often turned admiringly on him as he sprung like a young elk from one narrow projection to another, and strode over the shaking beams as erectly and haughtily as if he were crossing a hall of Wellesley House. At other times the eye might single him out, overtopping a throng of subordinates, gathered around the pit of some half-sunk foundation, watching intently while a train was laid to blast the rocks beneath, and, when the whole infernal disposition was completed, giving the order to fall back in his own full and thrilling tones, lingering the last on the path of retreat, and, as the heaven-rending thunder burst up from its stony tomb in a crack that shook hill and plain, far and near, commencing the triumphant huzza, whose swell arose as the peal of the rock-quake died into groaning echoes. But when all this was past, towards evening, when the workmen had retired from the busy scene, when the architects and master masons and carpenters had gathered their rules, squares, compasses, etc., and departed, then might a spectator, if any at that time tarried on the scene, discern that stately form sitting solitary on the rough-hewn steps of an embryo hall. All around him silent, lonely, desolate. Still as Tadmor in the wilderness, voiceless as Tyre on the forsaken sea. Mallet, hammer, axe and chisel all unheard. The blast-thunder of the day forgotten, the shouts of the labourers asleep, their echoing footsteps passed away, and the lull of twilight stealing on a faint wind, and the low moan of the old inhabited town down from heaven, up from earth, through the becalmed region. At such an hour Zamorna's figure would be visible, sole inhabitant of his rising city, his arms probably folded on his breast; his eyes fixed with a mingled expression of thought and vigilance (not much of sorrow) on the yellow prairie stretching eastward before him, and finding no boundary save the golden skyline; the brow of youth and beauty, clothed with a cloud of sternness that lay on it as the shadow of an ominous sky lies on the white marble wall of a palace; the fresh red lips closely met, as placidly motionless as of eternal silence had fixed them with her seal, and no token of deep emotion apparent, of any feeling, indeed, save absorbing meditation, except the varying hue of the cheek, which now and then, at long intervals, died suddenly away from its ordinary warm bright flush to a stricken and colourless pallor. Then it might be known there was a worm gnawing at the heart, that some pang, of deadlier agony than usual, had called the blood back to its source. But ere long the pure eloquent glow would steal again over the whitened complexion, and as the Duke slightly changed his position and turned his eyes more fixedly to the dim east, or perhaps let them fall on the reedy banks of the Calabar, it was evident his spirit had, for a time at least, conquered its inward tormentor, and that plans of warlike or political ambition were once more forced into predominance over the paternal anguish whose recurrence racked him so bitterly.

[The Spell, Bronte, C.]