marble

I with your marble of Saturday last,

A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king’s elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees.

There was a ruined summer-house of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago.

But the walls were made of screens of marble tracery--beautiful milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the open work, casting shadows on the ground like black velvet embroidery.