It Was So

“In the square loomed a huge black tower—with massive fortress walls and rare narrow arrow-slit windows. Once, it had been built for robber knights, but they had long since vanished, and the tower had become half a prison for dangerous and important criminals, and half a place to live. With each passing century, new buildings were added to it, attaching them to the thick wall and to one another; step by step, it turned into a whole little settlement on a rock—with a disorderly forest of chimneys, small towers, and sharp roofs. And when, in the west, the sky began to pale with a greenish light, while in the windows, now high and now low, little lights flashed, the black bulk took on strange, fantastic outlines—and somehow it seemed that at its base there was not an ordinary cobblestone street, but a sea—salty, boundless ocean…”