Jean Fragonard The Bathers

Jean Fragonard The BathersThomas Gainsborough Mrs SheridanSandro Botticelli Venus and MarsJean Beraud La Rue de la PaixHenri Rousseau The Snake Charmer
it thronged:
Teppic watched from the top of a wind-etched obelisk as the grey and brown, and here and there somewhat greenish, armies of the departed passed beneath him. The kings had been democratic. After the pyramids had been emptied gangs of them had turned their attention to the lesser tombs, and now the necropolis really did have its as he leapt from monument to monument, zig-zagging high above the shuffling army.
Behind him shoots appeared briefly in the ancient stone, cracking it a little, and then withered and died.
This, said his blood as it tingled around his body, is what you trained for. Even Mericet couldn't mark you down for this. Speeding in the shadows above a silent city, running like a cat, finding handholds that would have perplexed a gecko - and, at the destination, a victim.
True, it was a billion tons of pyramid, and hitherto the largest client of an intradesmen, its nobles and even its artisans. Not that there was, by and large, any way of telling the difference. They were, to a corpse, heading for the Great Pyramid. It loomed like a carbuncle over the lesser, older buildings. And they all seemed very angry about something. Teppic dropped lightly on to the wide flat roof of a mastaba, jogged to its far end, cleared the gap on to an ornamental sphinx - not without a moment's worry, but this one seemed inert enough - and from there it was but the throw of a grapnel to one of the lower storeys of a step pyramid. The long light of the contentious sun lanced across the spent landscape