Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

On a supremely hot noon of August, Mr Edward Murk, walking leisurely along a road pounded and compounded of small coal, came down towards the ancient city of Liége, and paused at a vantage-point to take in the prospect. This was a fair enough one to any vision, and fair in the extreme to eyes so long drilled to the interminable perspectives of Flanders -- to loveless dykes, to canals like sleek ingots of glass, to stretched ribbons of highways tapering to a flat horizon -- as that a tumulus would seem as sweet a thing for them to rest on as a woman's bosom. Now his sight, reining up against hills, gave him a certain emotion of surprise, such as he might have felt if a familiar hunter had unexpectedly shied at a hedgerow.

He stood a little above the town, looking over and beyond it. In the middle-distance of his picture -- pulled into the soft arms of hills that, melting to their own embrace, became mere swimming banks of mist -- floated a prismatic blot of water -- the vista of the Meuse -- dinted like an opal with shadowy reflections, and lit with sudden sparks in dreamy places. Thence, nearer, a greystone bridge -- its arches glazed, he could have thought, with mother-of-pearl windows, like a Chinese model in ivory -- bestrode the river channel, seeming to dam back, against his foreground, an accumulated litter of wall and roof and gable, that choked the town reaches, and, breaking away piecemeal, stranded its jetsam all down the valley. Here and there fair steeples stood up from the litter; here and there, in his close neighbourhood, gaunt chimney-stocks exhaled a languid smoke, like tree trunks blasted in a forest fire.