Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/151

 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF FORM. remarked, these ruined monuments have an extraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They give an im- pression of far greater height than they really possess (Fig. 36). At certain hours of the day, we are told, this illusion is very strong : in the early morning when the base of the mound is lost in circling vapours and its summit alone stands up into the clear sky above and receives the first rays of the sun ; and in the evening, when the whole mass rises in solid shadow against the red and ^old o f ^g western sky. At these times it is easy to comprehend the ideas by which the Chaldaean architect was animated when he created the type of these many-storied towers and scattered them with such profusion over the whole face of the country. The chief Fir,. 36. Haman, in Lower Chaldoea. From Loftus. want of his land was the picturesque variety given by accidents of the ground to its nearest neighbours, a want he endeavoured to conceal by substituting these pyramidal temples, these lofty pago- das, as we are tempted to call them, for the gentle slopes and craggy peaks that are so plentiful beyond the borders of Chaldaea. By their conspicuous elevation, and the enormous expenditure of labour they implied, they were meant to break the uniformity of the great plains that lay about them ; at the same time, they would astonish contemporary travellers and even that remote posterity for whom no more than a shapeless heap of ruins would be left. They would do more than all the writings of all the his- torians to celebrate the power and genius of the race that dared thus to correct and complete the work of nature.
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