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XIII
Wells of India! tombs! monuments full of stars!
You whose interior offers to troubled eyes
Only a whirling mass of steps and ramps,
Cold dungeons, corridors where lamps shine,
Beams where the spider has stretched its long threads,
Blocks sketching everywhere sinister profiles,
Granite roofs, pierced like a fragile web,
Through which the eye sees some deep star shine,
And chaos of walls, of chambers, of landings,
Where a gulf of stairways collapses at random!
Crypts that fill with religious horror
Your endless vault, gloomy and prodigious!
Caverns where the mind dares not go too far!
Before your depths I have often grown pale
As on an abyss or a furnace,
Frightful Babels that Piranesi dreamed!
Enter if you dare!
On the sleeping pavement
The shadows of the arches cross mournfully;
The slab in places, bending under the debris,
Half-opens to let pass dark steps
That dig, stone screw, an bottomless underground;
Others climb up there and break through the ceiling.
Where do they go? God knows. From the hollow of an empty arch
Water falling sends a livid glow.
A vault with a green face drips into a well,
In the shadow a heavy heap of unsupported rocks
Stops, held back by climbing brambles;
A rope hanging from a mass of timbers
Offers itself, mysterious, to the passerby’s hand.
In a vault, bent over a book, and reading,
A superhuman old man, under the overhanging rock,
Seems to live forgotten by death in his tomb.
Sphinxes, brazen bulls, crouched on the prow,
Have made capitals for the decrepit pillars;
The asp with the ember eye, fluttering its eyelids,
Passes its flat head through the cracks of the stones.
Everything wavers and bends under the half-open roofs.
The wall oozes, and one sees swarming through
Great russet foliage, coming out from between the marbles,
Monsters one would take for tree roots.
Everywhere, on the walls of the gloomy monument,
Something dreadful creeps confusedly;
And he who traverses this deformed labyrinth,
As if seized by an enormous polyp,
On his startled brow, under his hazardous foot,
Feels the hideous edifice live and stir!
At hours when the mind, whose eye rests everywhere,
Seeks to see in the night the bottom of all things,
In these frightful places my gaze was lost.
Very often I have contemplated them, and I said:
— O dreams of granite! visionary grottoes!
Crypts! palaces! tombs, full of vague thunders!
You are less misty, less black, less unknown,
You are less deep and less desperate
Than destiny, that lair inhabited by our fears,
Where the soul hears, lost, in frightful labyrinths,
At the bottom, through the shadow, with a thousand muffled sounds,
Into an unknown gulf the flood of days fall! —
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-wells-of-india-victor-hugo/