"Now I don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once
on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden
Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of
starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that
they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any
rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foreshore, I came
upon a long desolate beach, and a long desolate building,
magnificent of facade, new and yet ruinated, fronting the Bay
with a hundred empty eye-sockets.
"It broke on the view with a shock. It made me glance over my
shoulder to make sure of the real Biarritz not far behind.
But three or four spits of land shut off that human, if vulgar,
resort. Between me and the Pyrenees this immense ghastly
sarcophagus of misdirected enterprise possessed the landscape,
and I approached it. Yes, Roddy:"
Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.
"The horrible place turned out to be a mask--as I hope the Dark
Tower did, after all, for Childe Roland.
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