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A great old church in the depths of winter is a discouraging place at the best of times; the cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in its stones and to seep out of them.
he was caught up in the current of people and carried away to quite another part of the room. Round and round he went like a dry leaf caught up in a drain;
After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of the colour blue.
She wore a gown the colour of storms, shadows and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets.
Delaying only to write another paragraph, look up three or four things in a biography of Valentine Greatrakes, blot his paper, correct some spellings and blot his paper again, he went immediately to the drawing-room.
The birds were like black letters against the grey of the sky. He thought that in a moment he would understand what the writing meant. The stones in the ancient road were symbols foretelling the traveller’s journey
He no longer trusted that the books, the mirrors, the porcelain figure were really there. It was as if everything he could see was simply a skin that he could tear with one fingernail and find the cold, desolate landscape behind it.
On either hand empty moors the colour of a bruise stretched up to a dark sky that threatened snow. Grey, misshapen rocks were strewn about, making the landscape appear still more bleak and uncouth. Occasionally a low ray of sunlight would pierce the clouds, illuminating for a moment a white, foaming stream, or striking a pot-hole full of water that would suddenly become as dazzling as a fallen silver penny.
Chairs, paintings and lamps were all quite ghostly. Behind them lay the far more substantial and solid forms of Lost-hope’s bleak, grey halls and staircases.
“Of course,” remarked Strange to Childermass, “they make these scenes altogether too Roman – too like the works of Palladio and Piranesi, but they cannot help that – it is their training.
“I know the form of it,” said Mr Segundus. “But I have never been a practical magician.” “And you never will be, if you do not try. Do the magic, Mr Segundus.” So Mr Segundus did the magic.
