Location from Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
An infinite labyrinth of marble halls filled with statues, flooded by tides, drifted through by clouds — not a building but an entire world, beautiful and indifferent and older than memory.
The House is alive in the way a reef is alive — not sentient, perhaps, but responsive, tidal, breathing. The Lower Halls flood twice daily, salt water surging through vestibules with a deep percussive boom that shakes the statues in their niches. The Middle Halls are dry and still, warmed by a diffuse light that has no visible source. The Upper Halls touch the sky — or whatever stands in place of sky here — and clouds drift through them, condensing on marble surfaces, feeding freshwater streams that trickle down staircases into pools where moss grows. The air tastes of salt and stone. Sound behaves strangely: a whisper in one hall can be heard three halls away, while a shout in another is swallowed completely. The light changes slowly, suggesting day and night, but no sun is ever visible. Birds — albatrosses, mostly — wheel through the upper reaches, their cries echoing down through dozens of levels. The House provides. Fish come in with the tides. Fresh water gathers in the Upper Halls. Seaweed dries into fuel. It is possible to live here, if you are willing to learn the rhythms. It is possible to love it here, if you are the kind of person who loves the sea, and stone, and silence, and the company of beautiful things that do not speak.
Endless halls of pale grey-white marble, each as vast as a cathedral, connected by vestibules and staircases that spiral upward and downward beyond sight. Every wall is lined with niches containing statues — thousands of them, depicting every creature, every concept, every human emotion rendered in stone with breathtaking skill. The architecture follows no plan that any human mind could map completely. Halls open onto halls. Staircases connect levels that should not connect. Windows look out onto nothing but more halls, more statues, more pale luminous air. The scale is crushing and liberating in equal measure — you are small here, and the smallness is a relief.
Also known as: The House, The World, The Labyrinth