Each village was a long solid sheaf of towers. There were scores of them climbing into the sky in a rustic metropolis, each tower seeming to vie with the others in attaining more preposterous height: a vision as bewildering as the distant skyline of Manhattan or that first apparition of gaunt medieval skyscrapers that meets the eyes of the traveller approaching San Giminiano aross the Tuscan plain. But there were no bridges or ships here, no bastioned town wall or procession of cypresses to detract from the bare upward thrust of all these perpendiculars of sun-refracting facet and dark shadow. The tops were sawn off flat, the gun slits invisible. These two mad villages of Kitta and Nomia shot straight out of the rock in a grove of rectangular pipes the sides facing in every direction so that some of the towers were flanked with a stripe of shade, some turned bare and two-dimensional towards the sun, others twisted in their sockets and seems to present two visible and equal sides, one in light and one in shade, of symmetrical prisms. Nothing moved and in the trembling and fiery light they had the hallucinating improbability of a mirage.
P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 82
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