This was the era of the polykatoikia, the apartment block built of unadorned concrete and typically five or six storeys high.

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” mouldered in unvisited loneliness.

Even with all the windows open, there is hardly a breath of air in here.

... each of the marchers took his place beside the number nearest to him.