Crossword-Solution: ALABASTERS 10 letters, 7 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

And when they were free of this work they edified amongst the scented shrubs and blossoms a towering dome based upon four-square walls of variegated marbles and alabasters studded with carbuncles[FN#192] and its ceiling was supported upon columns of the finest stone with joinery of lign-aloes and sandal, and they dubbed its cupola with jewels and precious stones and arabesque'd[FN#193] it with gold and silver.

Franz was picking up pebbles and alabasters, some because they were so pretty, some to strike sparks with in the dark, and some he insisted were "gold." `"Jack! Jack!" cried he presently, "come and see the crabs on Fritz's jackal!" You know we threw it away there, and to be sure it was swarming with these creatures.

Now, what the Apostle says is that these builders were, some of them, laying valuable things like gold and silver and costly stones--by which he does not mean jewels, but marbles, alabasters, polished porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous building materials, which were employed in great palaces or temples--and that some of them were bringing timber, hay, stubble, reeds gathered from the marshes or the like, and filling in with such trash as that.

The transparent alabasters of San Miniato and the mosaics of Saint Mark's are more warmly filled and more brightly touched by every return of morning and evening rays, while the hues of the Gothic cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud, and the temples, whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontory, stand in their faded whiteness like snows which the sunset has left cold.

Alabasters, of which there are numerous varieties, from pure diaphanous white to the deepest black, were favourite decorative materials with the ancient Romans.