The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (15 page)

The earth grows wan and weird, defertilized, dehumanized, neither brown nor gray nor beige nor taupe nor ecru, the no color of death reflecting light, sponging up light with its hard, parched shag and shooting it back at us....

Walls of daffodil yellow are broken by vermillion pylons, purple buttresses appear against rosy domes, and vistas of turquoise blue terminate in great ships’ bows of ultramarine. GUIDEBOOK TO THE NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR, 1939/1940 (AS QUOTED IN HELEN A. HARRISON,

At Stenness, only three of an original twelve or thirteen stones survive; but the ruins remain impressive, as much because of the peculiar characteristics of the flagstone as because of the massive size of the slabs. All are more than fifteen feet tall, quite broad, but remarkably slender, one waif-like sheet being less than a foot in thickness. The Brod- gar stones are of the same flagstone; changing colour according to the light, they sometimes seem a pinkish buff, but the hues are spangled with white and lemon lichen blotches, and sometimes a furry, blue-green lichen growth.

Eventually I identified the rocks. The petrified roses were barite, probably from Oklahoma. The scratchy brown mineral was bauxite—aluminum ore. The black glass was obsidian; the booklet of transparent sheets was mica; the goldeny iridescent handful of soft crystals was chalcopyrite, an ore of copper....

The scattered polychrome of the exterior, strewn with blobs and drops as if handfuls of coloured confetti have been thrown at it, evokes the atmosphere of a Venetian carnival with gondolas and crinolines.

The smaller man was looking around, with the air of a child just come to a birthday party—at the clumsy old island schooners tied up at the water’s edge, with red sails furled; at the native women in bright dresses and the black ragged crewmen, bargaining loudly over bananas, coconuts, strange huge brown roots, bags of charcoal, and strings of rainbow-colored fish; at the great square red fort, and at the antique cannons atop its slanted seaward wall, pointing impotently to sea; at the fenced statue of Amerigo Vespucci, almost hidden in purple, orange, and pink bougainvillea; at the houses of Queen’s Row, their ancient arching plaster facades painted in vivid colors sun-bleached to pastels; at the old gray stone church, and the white-washed Georgian brick pile of the Sir Francis Drake Inn.

New elements (especially prevalent in the highlands) include the first attempts at polychrome painting (black, white, red, and yellow paints applied after firing), the first bichrome slipping (for instance, red-on-cream and red-on-orange), and the beginnings of the Usulutan tradition of resist decoration. Red, black, orange, and streaky brown slipped wares are typical; the streaky-brown pieces were often highly polished.

But above all it is the fantastic colouring of the beaches that as an image overpowers the minutiae. Above the tide-line the grey rocks are splashed gorse-yellow with close-growing lichen, and with others of blue-green and salmon pink. Beneath them are the vivid orange-browns and siennas of wrack-weeds, the violet of mussel-beds, dead-white sand, and water through which one sees down to the bottom, as through pale green bottle-glass, to where starfish and big spiny urchins of pink and purple rest upon the broad leaves of the sea-tangle.

The picture was her final treasure waiting to be packed for the journey. In whatever room she had called her own since childhood, there it had also lived and looked at her, not quite familiar, not quite smiling, but in its prim colonial hues delicate as some pressed flower. Its pale oval, of color blue and rose and flaxen, in a battered, pretty gold frame, uncon querably pervaded any surroundings with a something like last year’s lavender.

The mountains were covered with a rug of trees, green, yellow, scarlet and orange, but their bare tops were scarfed and beribboned with snow. From carved rocky outcrops, waterfalls drifted like skeins of white lawn, and in the fields we could see the amber glint of rivers and the occasional mirror-like flash of a mountain lake....

Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pairs of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets hurled themselves gainst men in blue silky glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chill- ingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.

I haven’t (the seeing eye), unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return—towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.

A triangle of white light was advancing from the porch into the sitting room, over the curling edge of the electric-blue carpet, which lay untacked on the terrazzo floor.

The wind howled, piling up snow in drifts and blinding the night with ice-white dust. I walked bent over against the cold, protecting my eyes with my arms. Trees, posts, cowsheds loomed into my vision, then vanished, swallowed in white.