Straight before us stretched away what had evidently been the main thoroughfare of the city, for it was very wide, wider than the Thames Embankment, and regular.Being, as we afterwards discovered, paved, or rather built, throughout of blocks of dressed stone, such as were employed in the walls, it was but little overgrown even now with grass and shrubs, that could get no depth of soil to live in.What had been the parks and gardens, on the contrary, were now dense jungle.Indeed, it was easy even from a distance to trace the course of the various roads by the burned-up appearance of the scanty grass that grew upon them.On either side of this great thoroughfare were vast blocks of ruins, each block, generally speaking, being separated.from its neighbor by a space of what had once, I suppose, been garden-ground, but was now dense and tangled bush.They were all built of the same colored stone, and most of them had pillars, which was as much as we could make out in the fading light as we passed swiftly up the main road, that I believe I am right in saying no living foot had pressed for thousands of years.
Presently we came to an enormous pile, which we rightly took to be a temple covering at least four acres of ground, and apparently arranged in a series of courts, each one enclosing another of smaller size, on a principle of a Chinese nest of boxes, which were separated one from the other by rows of huge columns.
And, while I think of it, I may as well state a remarkable thing about the shape of these columns, which resembled none that I have ever seen or heard of, being fashioned with a kind of waist in the centre, and swelling out above and below.At first we thought that this shape was meant to roughly symbolize or suggest the female form, as was a common habit among the ancient religious architects of many creeds.