The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 01Stevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 01
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is now one
in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.--To complete the
view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New: here, full
of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its
many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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