nice paragraph 002

Shortly after Anne had finished her story, I asked her to call a taxi for me. When she returned from making the call, she said that, as she replaced the receiver, the dream she had had just before she awoke from her afternoon nap came back to her. We were all three in Norwich, she said, and, because Michael still had appointments to keep, I had ordered a taxi for her. When it drove up it appeared to be a large, gleaming limousine. I held the door open for her and she climbed into the back. Without a sound the limousine began to move, and, before she had settled herself, she was out of the town and surrounded by an immense forest, shot through by rays of sunlight, which extended over many miles all the way down to the Middleton house. At an even speed that could neither be said to be fast or slow we travelled along a soft, gently curving track. The atmosphere through which the car moved was denser than air and somewhat resembled streaming currents of deep, silent water. She saw the forest, Anne said, with absolute clarity and in meticulous detail impossible to put into words, as it slid past outside: the tiny fruit capsules on stems protruding from patches and cushions of moss, the hair-thin grass stalks, the quivering ferns and the upright grey and brown, smooth or rough-barked trunks of trees that were lost a few yards up amidst the impenetrable leafage of the evergreens growing amongst them. Higher still were clusters of mistletoe, mimosa and lobelia, and cascading down into them from the next level of this luxuriant forest realm, in clouds of snow-white or pink, were hundreds of flowering plants and lianas from branches that reached out like the yard arms of great sailing ships, festooned with bromeliads and orchids . . .

. . . I have only an indistinct notion of how beautiful it all was, said Anne, nor can I properly describe now the feeling of being driven in that limousine that appeared to have no one at the wheel. It was not really like driving at all, it was more like floating, in a way I have not experienced since my childhood, when I was able to hover a few inches above the ground. As Anne was talking, we had walked out together into the garden, where night had already fallen. We waited for the taxi beside the Holderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.