The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (10 page)

As we drew close to the next floor, I could see a green glow coming from under the crenellated slit where the escalator steps disappeared....

The turbid water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all other sounds were lost in the noise of its splashing and eddying against the green and slimy piles.

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch.

It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture.

Pseudo-Arabic minarets, dentils, and spindled galleries silhouette the outlines of furniture designed on the circle and its parts—the arc and chord. The wooden frame was covered in chamois leather within
repoussé
metal mounts or veneered in pewter and brass with insect-like motifs and Middle Eastern calligraphy.

Both saw Violet-le-Duc’s influence in the house’s whiplash contours.

I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was the usual way; but I had the demon’s own time with my armor, and this delayed me a little. It is troublesome to get into, and there is so much detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanket around your body, for a sort of cushion and to keep off the cold iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail—these are made of small steel links woven together, and they form a fabric so flexible that if you toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps into a pile like a peck of wet fishnet....

My horse was not above medium size, but he was alert, slender-limbed, muscled with watch springs, and just a grey-hound to go. He was a beauty, glossy as silk, and naked as he was when he was born, except for bridle and ranger saddle.

I could not go abroad in snow—it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man—a bubble. And fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity.

He sits me down, and sits himself down beside me. He puts an arm around my shoulders. The fabric is raspy against my skin, so unaccustomed lately to being touched.

He lets the book fall closed. It makes an exhausted sound, like a padded door shutting, by itself, at a distance: a puff of air. The sound suggests the softness of the thin oniony pages, how they would feel under the fingers. Soft and dry, like
papier poudre,
pink and powdery, from the time before, you’d get it in booklets for taking the shine off your nose, in those stores that sold candles and soap in the shapes of things: seashells, mushrooms. Like cigarette paper. Like petals.

She had a vision of her mad wet face against the sky, as she rocked on the slippery stone. She tried to catch at her habit to help her, but the stuff was slimy with wet and dirt. Then Sister Ruth seemed to fall into the sky with a scream, as she went over the railings.

A grainy, porous overlay might account for the waffling or graham-cracker appearance of much of the surface in the photos.

The buttress merged with roof and floor in flowing and perfectly proportioned curves. And on its face was superimposed a small, delicately sculptured column, so oddly weathered that it seemed almost a decorative afterthought. The surface of this column was rounded and smooth, as if it had been sandpapered by a patient carpenter, and its fine-drawn strata stood out sharp and clear, like the grain on unstained, highly polished wood.

... and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never gets flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass....

This was the road, and when the surface of the earth became too deeply pitted and potholed with traffic the cars and trucks would deviate and choose another course.

This was prudent, for in point of fact the dwarf, knowing his disposition, was lying in wait at a little distance from the sash armed with a large piece of wood, which, being rough and jagged and studded in many parts with broken nails, might possibly have hurt him.