Scaffolding, clinging to bald facades, seemed frail and cobwebby at
great height, and slabs of stone, drawn and held by cables near the
summit of chutes, looked like dice on the giddy slide.
Below in the still shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen
mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters,
flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and
the what-not that litters the path of construction. Without, in the
avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either
side, were low-riding, long, heavy, dwarf-wheeled vehicles and sledges
to which men, not beasts, had been harnessed. Here, also, were great
cords of new brick and avalanches of glazed tile where disaster had
overtaken orderly stacks of this multi-tinted material. In the open
spaces were covered heaps of sand, and tons of lime, in sacks; layers
of paint and hogsheads of tar; ingots of copper and pigs of bronze.
Roadways, beaten in the dust by a multitude of bare feet, led in a
hundred directions, all merging in one great track toward the camp of
the laboring Israelites.
This was pitched in a vast open in the city's center, wherein Rameses
II had planned to build a second Karnak to Imhotep.
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