World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
The fine old warden of the keys told me he couldn’t take me over the
place without a permit from the architect of the city, so I went to the
architect’s home, only to find him out. When I returned to the
cathedral, disappointed, the old man said that if I would return at nine
in the morning he would take me through. At nine in the morning we
started. We started up the tower and branched off at one of the little
doors into the clerestory that led all around the inside of the church
nave. Here we saw the organ. From here we mounted a dark, uneven passage
within the walls which brought us out to the lowest stage of the roof,
where the bases of the flying buttresses rest. We traversed the gutter,
which was really a promenade, to the choir end of the cathedral. Here
again we wound up a circular stairs within a great buttress pier and
came out on the little narrow stair cut right up the flying buttress
span to the main roof. Here we entered another little door, and found
ourselves right in the garret over the altar. Under my feet was the
great span of the main vault, and over my head the original joinery of
the great peaked roof. In the darkness of the garret we passed great old
windlasses for lowering the huge candelabra which hung in the nave. We
traversed the garret to where through a little door a shaky scaffolding
led over a deep pit to the tower of the prison. Here, again, was a huge
chamber lighted by narrow slits in twenty-foot walls. We descended again
and at every landing was a narrow cell which came to a point in a small
slit which admitted light and indentation in the stone on which to sit.
It was uncanny. It was a relief to come again to the day, where the
bright sunlight played upon gargoyles and grotesques hiding in the
carved stone.
Such a feast of the imagination! I could sit down now and write a novel
laid in the confines of that pile. Then a fellow whom I met and I went
down and explored the crypt. There were unlit shrines and unaired vaults
which ended by a wall one could not see over, and the air was cool and
damp and so bad a match would not burn. We went out to breathe fresh
air, and dream in the sun.
YOUR SON.
_Ecole d’Aviation, Tours, August 28, 1917._
DEAR MOTHER:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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