Explore "The Inverted Pyramid" by Bertrand W. Sinclair on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Rod had come down a hall that had, like everything about Hawk's Nest, a spacious air. It was high and broad. Dim light filtered into it through stained-glass windows, fell in mellow patches on carpet so thick and soft that he moved silent as an ancestral phantom, -- which, however, was no part of the Norquay tradition. Active, resourceful men, and beautiful, gracious women had lived and moved and had their being there. Those comfortable homelike rooms had seen their joys and minor tragedies, births and deaths, quarrels and affections. Some of them had left various monuments to their credit, chiefly in the upbuilding and sustaining of the Norquay fortunes. But none, the remembered and the forgotten, had ever returned in the spirit. It was as if having lived their span they were content to let their descendants have undisturbed possession.
Probably Rod was the only Norquay under that roof who had so clear a vision of all that had preceded him, and so faint a comprehension of his future. The normal youngster of that age is eagerly forward-looking. He has no retrospect. He is full of impatient hopes, dreams, desires, whenever he lifts his eyes beyond the absorbing present. Rod deliberately refrained from lifting the curtain of the future. When he went beyond the engrossing moment, he looked backward over the history of his country and his family which were so closely knit, -- and he saw all the great adventures, the exciting struggles, the foundation-laying and the slow purposeful upbuilding, as something which had become a finished process before he was born. He would spend hours mooning over his great-great-grandfather's journal and feel a pang of regret that he had not lived in those quickening days. They were gone. The land was tamed. The Chilcotins would never again come raiding. The sea otters were vanished along with the men who hunted them. The trading vessel, square-rigged or fore-and-after, had given way to the steam tramp. From Land's End to the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a twenty-day voyage instead of thirty weeks. Law, order, custom molded men now.