Explore "The Ruined Temple" by Elizabeth Rundle Charles on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.