The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (8 page)

The stub of a candle, barely two inches long, lit at first attempt. The shadows of the switchboard cupboard bobbed against the wall at my approach. It looked different. The little wooden handle on its door was longer, more ornate, and set at a new angle. I was two feet away when the ornamentation resolved itself into the form of a scorpion, fat and yellow, its pincers curved about the axis of the diagonal and its chunkily segmented tail just obscuring the handle beneath.

... I could imagine how, in our absence, June’s spirit, her many ghosts, might stealthily reassert possession, recapturing not just her furniture and kitchenware and pictures but the curl of a magazine cover, the ancient Australia-shaped stain on the bathroom wall, and the latent body shape of her old gardening jacket, still hanging behind a door because no one could bear to throw it out. IAN MC EWAN ,
Black Dogs

Kayerts stood still. He looked upwards; the fog rolled low over his head. He looked round like a man who has lost his way; and he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist.

The room’s one window, too high for a woman not standing on a stool to peer out of, had lozenge panes of leaded glass, thick glass bubbled and warped like bottle bottoms.

Sometimes a young man appears, bearing the twin drums, the
tablas,
to help her with the necessary percussion which otherwise she provides herself with sharp little flicks of her supple fingers on the onion-shaped tamboura.

Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it.
Serena Joy,
it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges.

With such exuberant invention, the identity of the animals represented can become very obscure. Usually there are precise clues. Two prominent teeth and a rectangular cross hatched tail among the maze of symbols indicate a beaver; a wide toothless mouth and no tail, a frog; a dorsal fin and a blow-hole, a killer whale.

Set on a basement of “rusticated” stonework of varying tones, its principal story is built of tan brick banded with strips of gaily-floriated tiles, which parallel the lines of the basement. Then, based on the module of the square flower tile, there rises an intricately corbelled cornice, a series of chimneys and a cylindrical tower, all of which are harmoniously interrelated by patterns such as chevrons and prisms.

Bichrome wares accompany the prevalent monochrome pottery described above, but with the addition of white-painted motifs. The primarily geometric designs include bands, circles, dots, scrolls, frets, zigzags, triangles, diamonds, chevrons, and sunbursts, either singly or in combination, although some may represent stylized animals. Common shapes are water jars, with designs painted on the vessel shoulders and handles, and tripod-supported bowls with flaring walls, often painted white on both interior and exterior surfaces.

The entrance to this ancient place of devotion was under a very low round arch, ornamented by several courses of that zig-zag moulding, resembling sharks’ teeth, which appears so often in the more ancient Saxon architecture.

The North Rim is so deeply excavated by side canyons that in certain sections its pattern resembles a giant-toothed comb. The side canyons of the South Rim merely serrate it in gentle scallops.

The wall decoration contains an arabesque motif in its intersecting semicircular shapes.

Within the channels are many features, such as teardrop-shaped islands, longitudinal grooves, terraced margins, and inner channel cataracts, that are also found in regions on Earth affected by large floods.

Men swore. They pushed at the wheels with long oak poles and slashed at the oxen till their backs were crosshatched with bleeding welts and their noses ran pink foam.

Then I went out to the courtyard. The night was clear. The toothed roof-edge, the watchman with his spear and horn, stood black against the stars.