Read "The Ruined Temple" by Elizabeth Rundle Charles online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THE Temple was in ruins, and the Priestess sat, a captive in chains, / among its broken and scattered fragments.
It had been a temple of the most ancient form, open to the sky, / beautiful beyond any temple upon earth, beautiful and sacred, and some / remnants of its beauty hung about it still-fragments of exquisite / carvings and broken shafts of graceful columns. But everything was / shattered and out of place, the window tracery shivered in a thousand / fragments and strewn on the ground, columns prostrate, sacred vessels / lying rusted among the weeds, the pure spring which had gushed from / beneath the altar choked up and dry, and instruments of sacred music / mute and broken on the ground.