Explore "Pharos, the Egyptian" by Guy Boothby on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If there is one place more than another for which I entertain a dislike that is akin to hatred, it is for Naples in the summer time -- that wretched period when every one one knows is absent, all the large houses are closed, the roads are knee-deep in dust, and even the noise of the waves breaking upon the walls of the Castello del' Ovo seems unable to alleviate the impression of heat and dryness which pervades everything.
It is the season when the hotels, usually so cool -- one might almost say frigid -- have had time to grow hot throughout, and are in consequence well-nigh unbearable; when the particular waiter who has attended to your wants during each preceding visit, and who has come to know your customs and to have survived his original impression that each successive act on your part is only a more glaring proof of your insular barbarity, is visiting his friends in the country, or whatever it is that waiters do during the dull season when the tourists have departed and their employers have no further use for them. It was at this miserable period of the year that I descended upon Naples in search of Monsieur Pharos.