The red weed grew tumultuously in their
roofless rooms.
We passed several islands on which were strangely shaped circular buildings, apparently
roofless, and pierced midway between the ground and their tops with small, heavily barred windows.
I shall never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains.
The officers, as usual, lived in twos and threes in the
roofless, half-ruined houses.
How matters were finally settled I do not know, but we found ourselves
roofless, shelterless, and without a copper.
The cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a
roofless exposure for which they were never made.
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.
Fate guided him to the very doorway of the great
roofless chamber.
Close to the road, on their left, was a
roofless house, and a family of children crying underneath a tarpaulin shelter.
Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers
roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its old might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry.
For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old
roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
They rose up and confronted the midnight intruder on every side-- they stared at him with stony eyes from unlooked-for nooks and recesses; they peered at him over fragmentary heaps far down the desolate corridors; they barred his way in the midst of the broad forum, and solemnly pointed with handless arms the way from the sacred fane; and through the
roofless temple the moon looked down, and banded the floor and darkened the scattered fragments and broken statues with the slanting shadows of the columns.