A poetic description of an ancient and abandoned bell tower; somehow ‘beam-borne’ implies flying rather than static, and I liked also the ‘moth-soft’ of the imagined bell rope tallies.
‘It suggested a belfry so convincingly that one expected to see ropes disappearing through slots in the thick beam-borne planks overhead, their tallies waiting moth-soft and wine-coloured in mid-air for the grasp of bellringers.’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 80
