Explore "The Inquisitor" by Hugh Walpole on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is queer, the things that can happen to towns. Or is it, perhaps, not so queer? Are towns only the camping-places for human beings on duty, or do they by means of the battles fought on their territory acquire independent life because the ground is soaked in blood and the air thick with the after-smoke of the cannon? When one man, falling with a bird's scream from the Rock to the stream below, saw in his last plunging moment that town, slanting roofs, walls, and all in mockery of him, was that man's small bursting heart an addition to the town's personal spirit?
Is the Cathedral, as Crispangle selling bibles and prayer-books in his bookshop calls it, 'the dead palace of a forgotten king,' or are the palace passages thronged with servants, suppliants, warriors, members of the Royal Family? At least we can say that we know nothing about either Death or Time, whether, even, they have any existence or no. .