This poem only emphasised for me the suspicion that I had originally
had, that the great river and the marshy swamp around it despised
contemptuously the buildings that man had raised beside and upon it, and
that even the buildings in their turn despised the human beings who
thronged them. It could only be some sense of this kind that could make
one so repeatedly conscious that one's feet were treading ancient
ground.
The town, raised all of a piece by Peter the Great, could claim no
ancient history at all; but through every stick and stone that had been
laid there stirred the spirit and soul of the ground, so that out of one
of the sluggish canals one might expect at any moment to see the horrid
and scaly head of some palaeolithic monster with dead and greedy eyes
slowly push its way up that it might gaze at the little black hurrying
atoms as they crossed and recrossed the grey bridge. There are many
places in Petrograd where life is utterly dead; where some building,
half-completed, has fallen into red and green decay; where the water
lies still under iridescent scum and thick clotted reeds seem to stand
at bay, concealing in their depths some terrible monster.
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