He had christened the place after the best of examples, "Sans
Souci."
But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he
never used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To
build it, they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the
true Imperial lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness
of trees and bush, looking out over a land relapsed now altogether
to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the
tropical sky--for even the guards who still watched over its
suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had
made hovels outside its walls--and at the same time so huge and
grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores
of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king's apartments and
queen's apartments, towering battlements and great arched doorways--
that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and passing of that
miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of multitudes
before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more
completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
before.
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