Night time: a spirit of festivity is again in the air. And though it is not the idyllic Arcadian gaiety of the pastorale but something more sophisticated, more artificial, still there’s an atmosphere of expectancy and joyous excitement gleaming from the eyes of street lamps and lighted windows. In fact it is a city of lights, the whole dream is ablaze with light, the whole sky is one vast shimmering aurora borealis of reflected brilliance. It’s impossible to tell whether the stars are out or whether the moon is shining. All one sees in looking over the housetops is a diaphanous aerial curtain of wonderfully blended hues, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, the whole spectrum extended and repeated from horizon to horizon like an endless series of rainbows in tremendous array. And on top of this, as if such a display wasn’t dazzling enough, over the glimmering folds of the resplendent light-curtain, strange wavering bands of pure white luminosity flicker and weave strands so incandescent that they appear to be glowing with limpid fire.
It’s really too much of a strain on the eyes, one can’t look upwards for long. Not that there is any contrasting dimness below. The streets are as bright as day, for the numerous street lights on normal duty are for this special night reinforced by countless additional flares, torches, links, blazing braziers, relics of ancient times which have perhaps been preserved and stored for the purpose of being resurrected on occasions of this sort. Nearly every window, too, seems to be pointing its burning finger into the night; for few people have thought of drawing the curtains.
At the palace a state ball is in full swing. The great building, with every window aflame, rides the night like an enormous ship, isolated as it is from the glaring streets in a dim sea of encircling gardens where only the fairy-lights show a pale luminous phosphorescence among the trees and the sleeping roses. It is tempting to linger in these cool shadowed walks drowsy with the heavy scent of night-stocks and tobacco flowers. Hidden away at the edge of a lily pool is an arbour where the glow-worm globe silvers the cheek of a gardenia and the folds of a lady’s gown. Accompanied by the faintest rustle of silk, a pair of lovers drifts past the little statue who holds up his cornucopia full of a pretty paleness of flowers or snow.
But here is the wide sweep, deserted now, where recently arriving guests thronged beneath tasselled awnings; where still the guards stand frozen in their grand uniforms, the powdered lackeys no less immobilized beyond.
There’s no need to describe the splendours of the palace; the statues, the winging staircases, the columns, the balustrades of marble and onyx and agate and porphyry. What’s the use of talking about the grandeur of the ballroom, the elegance of the dancers, the skill of the orchestra? Such things are better left to the imagination so that everyone can fill in for himself such details as he finds most satisfactory. Just as we can all picture the magnificent banquet overflowing with choicest wines, fruits, rare dishes of all descriptions, sanglier, sturgeon’s roe, peacocks stuffed with peaches, or whatever seems most delectable and exotic.
Only as regards the ballroom it is necessary to mention the elaborate chandeliers (if that is the right term with which to describe these sparkling crystal confections of ice-bright lights, fantastically crownshaped, and pouring an absolute flood of brilliance upon the scene). It is these amazing illuminations which give the ballroom such a unique distinction; for they are quite unforgettable; and a person who has once seen them is not likely to be much impressed by any other wonder encountered in his travels about the world
which makes all the more surprising the potency of the attraction that draws the girl with the glistening green glass slippers to leave her partner standing thunderstruck immmediately under one of the radiant crowns in order to follow a silhouette darkly beckoning and window-framed in the sapphire recessive night.
And so on: in considerable repetition, with varying detail, of the basic situation; the central theme itself being subject to variation in so far as the attraction is not inevitably to darkness from light.
For instance; the dream travels, quite briefly, through a picture sequence in which each view lasts only just long enough for apperception before it is superseded.
At first there is seen, from some distance away, a small one-storey house near the edge of a forty-foot cliff, at night; it is not very dark. The shut box of the house, with snaky convolutions of surrounding tree-trunks, is at the top of this picture: the rocky cliff face (below it the tarry water) is the crucial centre. Next a glimpse of the interior in which (in bedroom with drawn blinds) an indication is made of someone asleep in bed: the indication further extended to suggest B. Quick shift outside again to the night sky pricked with a few stars. Huge storm-clouds gathering, expanding, immediately eat up the sky and its stars. The sea rising: the heaving sea-mass bursts into white horses; the wind lets fly; the wind pitched so that its noise is too the hissing spray blown from the breakers which now are filling the dream picture. The cliff is black shadow. A wave crashes; against the rocks the waves hurling a deadwhale-deadweight of water; the spray unfurls its enormous fan; the rocks quake amongst rush and lather and foam of retreating water; their stubborn, drowned, again battered, not yet quite smothered heads (did they really tremble?); upthrusting spray jets higher and higher from the successive breakers. Terrific waves swelling; huger, fiercer waves accumulating and exploding: a wave pounds on a balanced rock; the rock lurches with thunder-thud into the seething sea trough: another pounding thunder-roar, and the cliff quivers with tremor of walls in bombardment.
A lightning flash is stabbed into the sky and jabbed at by other flashes, their crazy neons jittering into word shapes, WHAT IS LOST NOW IS OUR HOME IN THIS WORLD. Immediate glimpse of monstrous vicious crocodile snouts thrusting out of the waves and flaming, fire-belching with deafening shattering booming reverberation and blinding eye-thunder (black and fire everywhere); could be warships, submarines, could be leviathans in their death-throes.
Now the cliff, in black-and-white flaps of fire and thunder, bashed and battered by waves and beaten to breaking-point; rocks, a whole buttress, loosen with earthquake rumble, start to slither; a whole segment of the cliff crumbles and falls away, bearing with it a tree, torn-up roots wildly writhing; the house hanging suspended, projecting over the now concave cliff verge, overhanging nothing.
Inside the bedroom, the sleeper has woken. In this dark room a stirring movement, the door opening, someone entering. Hands, frailly phosphorescent, extended, groping, delicately contacting the edges of furniture, feeling their way like blind hands. A blue ring flashes; two hands are joined, one leading the other, and flashing its bright ring; the hands moving through the dark house together, in darkness, out of the house; leaving it:
outside the tumult speeds up, the storm noise getting steadily madder; the flaming monsters vomiting more and more frenziedly, blasting each other; finally wrecked and ruined and sinking, sizzling in sparks and white-hot seethe of lightning and steaming sea:
with deafening roar the entire cliff crumbles, collapses; the house curtseys, sinking forward slowly, turns over, slowly and gracefully disintegrates (walls fall outwards like sides of cardhouse), disappears.
The pandemonium is dimmed quickly into sound of rushing wind; dull, heavy and broken thumping of waves subsiding; then silence.
Two vague figures, one leading the other by the hand, seen receding far off under the quiet night sky where a few watery stars are starting to reappear.
A most remote, primordial scene. A large expanse of mountainous country, no trees, no water, no habitations. Although there are no really high peaks in sight one gets somehow the impression of being at a high altitude, on a plateau among the tops of the mountains. The rock formations are flattish, truncated, the higher tors assuming the shapes of miniature Table Mountains. The colouring a uniform cool lichen-grey.