Here are the quotations for this week (July 21st to 27th):
1. ...It was a slope of gap-edged fields possessed to their centres by
clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed
posts leaned out and in.In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught
their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of
the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge and frothed in the
wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond - old, tall, and
brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house...
2. ...Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of
the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things
awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches;
miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than
would ever vex them again; tithe barns larger than their churches, and an
old smithy that cried aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of
the Temple...
3. ...the life of the English road, which to me is one renewed and
unreasoning orgy of delight. The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile
Association; their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies,
the deliberate market-day cattle, broadside on at all corners, the bicycling
butcher's boy a furlong behind; road engines that pulled giddy-go rounds,
rifle galleries and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in
defiance of the notice-board; traction -engines, their trailers piled high
with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles,
flitting by on their wheels.
The sources of last week's extracts are as follows:
1. ('..there were shields of lacquer, of tortoise-shell and rhinoceros hide,
strapped and bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge...')
This is from 'The King's Ankus' in 'The Second Jungle Book'.
2. ('It blazed with the dull red of the ruby, the angry green of the
emerald, the cold blue of the sapphire and the white, hot glory of the
diamond...') This is from RK's "Story of West and East, 'The Naulahka"
3. ('..First are two flawed sapphires - one of two ruttees and one of four,
as I should judge. The four ruttee sapphire is chipped at the edge...')
This is from 'Kim'.
Good wishes to all, John R
