  We report the first measurement of collective charge modes of insulating
Sr14Cu24O41 using inelastic resonant x-ray scattering over the complete
Brillouin zone. Our results show that the intense excitation modes at the
charge gap edge predominantly originate from the ladder-containing planar
substructures. The observed ladder modes (E vs. Q) are found to be dispersive
for momentum transfers along the "legs" but nearly localized along the "rungs".
Dispersion and peakwidth characteristics are similar to the charge spectrum of
1D Mott insulators, and we show that our results can be understood in the
strong coupling limit (U >> t_{ladder}> t_{chain}). The observed behavior is in
marked contrast to the charge spectrum seen in most two dimensional cuprates.
Quite generally, our results also show that momentum-tunability of inelastic
scattering can be used to resolve mode contributions in multi-component
incommensurate systems.
