Here and There in the distance, above the crown of mob of low brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, King's Palace, temple, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one's breast with the breath of one's nostrils and soak into one's limb through every pore of one's skin.

-The Shadow Line,

Joseph Conrad, 1917