Their doors are closed, but their windows and fanlights shine like gold.

Between the taverns rise the fronts of some old houses, tenantless and hollow; others, in ruins, cut into this gloomy valley of the homes of men with notches of sky.

The iron-shod feet all around me on the hard road sound like the heavy rolling of drums, and then on the paved footpath like dragged chains.

It is in vain that I walk with head bent--my own footsteps are lost in the rest, and I cannot hear them.
We hurry, as we do every evening.

At that spot in the inky landscape where a tall and twisted tree seems to writhe as if it had a soul, we begin suddenly to descend, our feet plunging forward.