The Strife of Love in a Dream

BOOK ONE OF

amidst which, and between these fragments, many wild plants, herbs, and trees of various kinds had sprung up, such as myrtles, mastic trees, wild olives, centaury, vervain, gooseberry bushes, and capers. Then, against the ruined walls grew houseleek, polypody, scolopendrium—or hart's-tongue fern—senna, faunelikely a local variant of "faunée" or a similar wild herb, and pellitory. Between their crevices were many small lizards, and every little noise they made in this deserted place caused me a marvelous horror, considering I was already in suspense and doubt. There was a marvelous abundance of porphyry, jasper, and serpentine of all colors, very beautiful and rich, resembling a great quantity of pieces of diverse histories in bas-relieforiginal: "boisse & demytaille" and half-relief, showing the excellence of their time while blaming and accusing our own. Thus, at the principal front of this great edifice, I beheld an exquisite portal, well-proportioned to all the rest of the structure. The section of the wall continued from one of the mountains to the other, and was six stadesAn ancient Greek unit of distance, roughly 600 feet and twenty paces in length, as I was able to conjecture. The alignment of the mountains was plumb from the top to the bottom of the site. Therefore, I remained quite pensive and amazed as to how, with what iron tools and implements, with what labor, and by what human hands such an edifice had been constructed, at such great expense and consumption of time.

This wall had (in my judgment) the fifth part of a stade in height from the last cornice down to the foot and level of the pavement. It was made (as I have said) to enclose this valley, into which one could neither enter nor exit except through this gate, upon which was founded the great pyramid—so marvelous that I estimated the expense to be inestimable and the length of time to make it incredible. The multitude of men who worked on it was innumerable and infinite; for if merely looking at it confounded my understanding and dazzled my sight, what could it do to the intelligence of the building itself? Now, so that I do not fail to describe what I have seen, I will state its form in very few words. Each face or side of the square of the plinthThe heavy base or platform supporting the structure where the alignment of the steps forming the pyramid began, was six stades in length; these, multiplied by four for the circuit of the four equal squares, make twenty-four stades. The height was constructed in this manner: drawing the sloping lines A B and A C along the four corners from the plinth up to the highest of the steps, where they joined to form the pyramid. The cathetusoriginal: "cathet" - a vertical line or perpendicular line A D, being in the middle of these and falling straight upon the center of the plinth at point D, where the diagonal lines crossed, had a height of five parts, of which the sloping and collateral lines had six.

OF THE LOVE-STRUGGLE. VII

original: "DE Λ POLIPHILIE" - The title refers to the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" or Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream.