Slender The Arrival Quotes

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage. "There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

Inside, a mother superior, ethereal, delicate, who took me under her wing. She caressed me with her slender, soft hands, she sat next to me as if I were a friend. One day she disappeared. In her place arrived a buxom Swiss from Canton Uri. It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist’s satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship’s hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.

The next day, I started getting dressed at three for the rehearsal. The beautiful cherry red suit had black stitching, and I had taken the skirt to a seamstress to have it shortened to a sexy upper-midthigh length--an unfortunate habit I’d picked up while watching too much Knots Landing in the late 1980s. I was relatively slender and not the least bit stacked on top, and my bottom was somewhat fit but wildly unremarkable. If I was going to highlight any feature of my anatomy, it would have to be my legs. When I arrived at the rehearsal at the church, my grandmother kissed me, then looked down and said, “Did you forget the other half of your suit?” The seamstress had gotten a little overzealous.

Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for. She herself perhaps believed she was giving him the future and had encouraged him to believe it. But we were all confused, especially me. While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person. No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, "Sal, God has arrived." I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, "There ain't nothin left after that." But the slender leader frowned. "Let's blow anyway." Something would come of it yet. There's always more, a little further - it never ends. They sought to find new phrases after Shearing's explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy. They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned - and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o'clock in the morning everybody - musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist - staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.

As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence. But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already. Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

I have always been a teller of stories. When I was a young girl, my mother carried me out of a grocery store as I screamed about toes in the produce aisle. Concerned women turned and watched as I kicked the air and pounded my mother’s slender back. “Potatoes!” she corrected when we got back to the house. “Not toes!” She told me to sit in my chair—a child-sized thing, built for me—until my father returned. But no, I had seen the toes, pale and bloody stumps, mixed in among those russet tubers. One of them, the one that I had poked with the tip of my index finger, was cold as ice, and yielded beneath my touch the way a blister did. When I repeated this detail to my mother, something behind the liquid of her eyes shifted quick as a startled cat. “You stay right there,” she said. My father returned from work that evening, and listened to my story, each detail. “You’ve met Mr. Barns, have you not?” he asked me, referring to the elderly man who ran this particular market. I had met him once, and I said so. He had hair white as a sky before snow, and a wife who drew the signs for the store windows. “Why would Mr. Barns sell toes?” my father asked. “Where would he get them?” Being young, and having no understanding of graveyards or mortuaries, I could not answer. “And even if he got them somewhere,” my father continued, “what would he have to gain by selling them amongst the potatoes?” They had been there. I had seen them with my own eyes. But beneath the sunbeam of my father’s logic, I felt my doubt unfurl. “Most importantly,” my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, “why did no one notice the toes except for you?” As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on my way.

Desire is… " Desire is the glow of bathing lunatics. Starlight is the liquid used to power a whispering machine. Humming is the music of a forest moving in unison with your eyes. * A slip of the tongue and the hummingbird’s empty throne make the acquaintance of the word frenzy, which in turn adopts the phrase: “I am closest to you when we are furthest apart,” and together they follow the anxious doorway that leads far out of the city, where travelers always meet, alone and abandoned with only their mysteries to guide them… and when the sun bleeds out of the dampness of the earth, like pale limbs entwined and exhausted, they all pause in their own fashion to reflect not upon themselves but on the white wolves in the garden shivering like mist, in the mirror hiding your face. * The nature of movement is an image lost between the objects of an eclipse fervently scratched into the face of a sleeping woman when she approaches the liquid state of a circle, wandering aimlessly in search of lucidity and those moments of inarticulate suspicion… when the riddle is only half solved and the alphabet is still adding letters according to the human motors that have not yet arrived, as a species, scintillating in the grass, burning time. Not far from your name there is always a question mark, followed by silent paws… * It is not without the mask of the Enchanter’s dance of unreason, that joy follows the torment of seductive shapes, and sudden appearances in the whisper of long corridors. Tribal veils rising out of fingerprints on invisible entrances in the middle of the landscape, assume the form of her shoulders and the intimacy of her bones making dust, taking flight. * The axis of revolt and the nobility of a springtime stripped of its flowers, expertly balanced with a murmur of the heart on the anvil of chance. Your voice arcing between the two points of day and night, where the oracle of water spinning rapidly above, that is your city of numerology, mixes with the flux of a long voyage more stone-like and absurdly graceful then either milkweed or deadly nightshade, when it acclimatizes the elements of transparency in the host of purity. * The dream birds of a lost language are growing underground in the bed of sorcery. It is all revealed in the arms of your obsession, Arachne, (crawling to kiss) pale Ariadne, (kneeling to feed) in a pool of light that exceeds the dimensions of the loveliest crime. She turns into your evidence, gaining speed and recognition, becoming a brightness never solved, and a clarity that makes crystals. * The early morning hours share their nakedness with those who bare fruit and corset fireflies in long slender bath-like caresses. “Your serum, Sir Moor’s Head, follows the grand figures of the sea, ignites them, throws them like vessels out of fire, raising the sand upwards into oddly repetitive enchantments. Drown me in flight, daughter of wonder…

Lady Thornton, how very good of you to find the time to pay us a social call! Would it be too pushing of me to inquire as to your whereabouts during the last six weeks?” At that moment Elizabeth’s only thought was that if Ian’s barrister felt this way about her, how much more hatred she would face when she confronted Ian himself. “I-I can imagine what you must be thinking,” she began in a conciliatory manner. He interrupted sarcastically, “Oh, I don’t think you can, madam. If you could, you’d be quite horrified at this moment.” “I can explain everything,” Elizabeth burst out. “Really?” he drawled blightingly. “A pity you didn’t try to do that six weeks ago!” “I’m here to do it now,” Elizabeth cried, clinging to a slender thread of control. “Begin at your leisure,” he drawled sarcastically. “here are only three hundred people across the hall awaiting your convenience.” Panic and frustration made Elizabeth’s voice shake and her temper explode. “Now see here, sir, I have not traveled day and night so that I can stand here while you waste time insulting me! I came here the instant I read a paper and realized my husband is in trouble. I’ve come to prove I’m alive and unharmed, and that my brother is also alive!” Instead of looking pleased or relieved he looked more snide than before. “Do tell, madam. I am on tenterhooks to hear the whole of it.” “Why are you doing this?” Elizabeth cried. “For the love of heaven, I’m on your side!” “Thank God we don’t have more like you.” Elizabeth steadfastly ignored that and launched into a swift but complete version of everything that had happened from the moment Robert came up behind her at Havenhurst. Finished, she stood up, ready to go in and tell everyone across the hall the same thing, but Delham continued to pillory her with his gaze, watching her in silence above his steepled fingertips. “Are we supposed to believe that Banbury tale?” he snapped at last. “Your brother is alive, but he isn’t here. Are we supposed to accept the word of a married woman who brazenly traveled as man and wife with another man-“ “With my brother,” Elizabeth retorted, bracing her palms on the desk, as if by sheer proximity she could make him understand. “So you want us to believe. Why, Lady Thornton? Why this sudden interest in your husband’s well-being?” “Delham!” the duchess barked. “Are you mad? Anyone can see she’s telling the truth-even I-and I wasn’t inclined to believe a word she said when she arrived at my house! You are tearing into her for no reason-“ Without moving his eyes from Elizabeth, Mr. Delham said shortly, “Your grace, what I’ve been doing is nothing to what the prosecution will try to do to her story. If she can’t hold up in here, she hasn’t a chance out there!” “I don’t understand this at all!” Elizabeth cried with panic and fury. “By being here I can disprove that my husband has done away with me. And I have a letter from Mrs. Hogan describing my brother in detail and stating that we were together. She will come here herself if you need her, only she is with child and couldn’t travel as quickly as I had to do. This is a trial to prove whether or not my husband is guilty of those crimes. I know the truth, and I can prove he isn’t.” “You’re mistaken, Lady Thornton,” Delham said in a bitter voice. “Because of its sensational nature and the wild conjecture in the press, this is no longer a quest for truth and justice in the House of Lords. This is now an amphitheater, and the prosecution is in the center of the stage, playing a starring role before an audience of thousands all over England who will read about it in the papers. They’re bent on giving a stellar performance, and they’ve been doing just that. Very well,” he said after a moment. “Let’s see how well you can deal with them.

Marks was so self-contained and tenacious that it was often easy to forget she was still a young woman in her early twenties. When Leo had first met her, she had been the perfect embodiment of a dried-up spinster, with her spectacles and forbidding scowl and her stern hyphen of a mouth. Her spine was unbending as a fireplace poker, and her hair, the dull brown of apple moths, was always pinned back too tightly. The Grim Reaper, Leo had nicknamed her, despite the objections of the family. But the past year had wrought a remarkable change in Marks. She had filled out, her body slender but no longer matchstick thin, and her cheeks had gained color. A week and a half ago, when Leo had arrived from London, he had been absolutely astonished to see Marks with light golden locks. Apparently she had been dyeing her hair for years, but after an error on the part of the apothecary, she had been forced to abandon the disguise. And whereas the darker brown locks had been too severe for her delicate features and pale skin, her own natural blond was stunning. Which had left Leo to grapple with the fact that Catherine Marks, his mortal enemy, was a beauty. It wasn't really the altered hair color that made her look so different... it was more that Marks was so uncomfortable without it. She felt vulnerable, and it showed. As a result, Leo wanted to strip away more layers, literal and physical. He wanted to know her.

The bus drives up past the old brick factories of Pawtucket and Woonsocket. Finally, in the distance we can see Boston, where slender homes float above the glass towers. I shudder and minutes seem to take forever, and then the bus arrives.

Becoming aware of her presence in the doorway, the men looked up. Westcliff rose from his half-seated position on the desk. “My lord,” Daisy said, “if I might have a word with you?” Although she spoke calmly, something in her expression must have alerted him. He didn’t waste a second in coming to her. “Yes, Daisy?” “It’s about my sister,” she whispered. “It seems her labor has started.” She had never seen the earl look so utterly taken aback. “It’s too early,” he said. “Apparently the baby doesn’t think so.” “But…this is off-schedule.” The earl seemed genuinely baffled that his child would have failed to consult the calendar before arriving. “Not necessarily,” Daisy replied reasonably. “It’s possible the doctor misjudged the date of the baby’s birth. Ultimately it’s only a matter of guesswork.” Westcliff scowled. “I expected far more accuracy than this! It’s nearly a month before the projected…” A new thought occurred to him, and he turned skull-white. “Is the baby premature?” Although Daisy had entertained a few private concerns about that, she shook her head immediately. “Some women show more than others, some less. And my sister is very slender. I’m sure the baby is fine.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “Lillian has had pains for the past four or five hours, and now they’re coming every ten minutes or so, which Annabelle says—” “She’s been in labor for hours and no one told me?” Westcliff demanded in outrage. “Well, it’s not technically labor unless the intervals between the pains are regular, and she said she didn’t want to bother you until—” Westcliff let out a curse that startled Daisy. He turned to point a commanding but unsteady finger at Simon Hunt. “Doctor,” he barked, and took off at a dead run. Simon Hunt appeared unsurprised by Westcliff’s primitive behavior. “Poor fellow,” he said with a slight smile, reaching over the desk to slide a pen back into its holder.

Word has been spread to our accomplices within the city, London has armed the villagers and all are waiting for our signal.” Koranis stooped to hoist up a canvas bag, which he dropped on the rickety table before us. “The rockets,” he said, pulling a long, slender tube from the bag. “The King of Sarterad had to send all the way to Alidovia for these--they only arrived yesterday. Prop them up facing skyward, light the wick at the bottom and we have our signal.” He tossed the strange tube he held to Steldor, then removed two more from the bag for Galen and Temerson. “Set them off as planned, in the designated areas of the city, and be ready,” Cannan ordered. “I’ll certainly have to be,” said a new voice--one with an accent. We all leaped backward to face the cellar stairs, where we could hear methodical footsteps descending. Knives had appeared in the hands of the men around me; they were small, but they would be effective. The Cokyrian commander emerged into the torchlight, calm and unarmed. “Oh, good Lord,” King Adrik breathed, but everyone else stood silently, rigidly, their eyes assessing the enemy. Addressing the captain, Narian declared, “This stops now.” Cannan clenched his jaw and I slipped behind Steldor, hoping he could protect me. Maybe if I hid…but there was nowhere to conceal myself. I certainly had a knack for stumbling into the most compromising and dangerous of situations. I hadn’t been involved in this at all, but was sure to be sentenced for it now. Taking a breath, I forced myself to step into the open. After all, I had wanted to be here. And if I had to die, I stood in good company. “What is it you think you know?” Steldor demanded, but Narian ignored him, speaking only to Cannan. “You have the ability to be the voice of reason here. Don’t let these men walk to their deaths.” “Should I have them die by execution instead?” the captain ground out, but Narian did not flinch, continuing to stare at him, steely conviction in his eyes. “I’m alone, Cannan. I’ve been following your movements and the movements of your men since Shaselle was caught with that dagger, and I haven’t said a word to the High Priestess, to my comrades, not even to Alera. I’m giving you a chance to walk away, to live. Don’t be a fool--take it.” Cannan tucked his knife into the shaft of his boot, then cast his eyes over Steldor, Galen, Adrik and Koranis. All resolutely met his gaze. “I don’t see fear in this room, Narian,” he said, shaking his head. “Do what you must, as will we.

A slender woman greeted me. “You must be Fallon Carr.” Clearly she’d figured out who I was by elimination. Everyone else had arrived, and was seated like good little interns. Shit. With a smile, I nodded. “Yes. Sorry I’m late.” She glanced at a clock. “Looks like you’re on time to me.” And for the love of all things holy, the clock on the wall was a few minutes slow. It was the first thing to go right for me since stepping into the hospital today.

One sleepless night shortly after the boy’s arrival, I was going through a tough time, missing you. Bernard heard my sobs and crept into my bed. We held each other close. I could not help but relish his intimacy and his warm body next to mine. Wrapping my arms around the boy, we were aroused by the passionate auras surrounding the both of us. As an experienced ‘big brother’ I took charge. I kissed his tender lips before planting soft kisses on his closed lids, and soon I was nibbling at his delicate earlobes. He groaned with pleasure, desiring to do the same to me. Before I knew it, we were taking turns caressing each other’s nipples. Our seductive foreplay lasted for a long time until we could stave off our sexual urges no longer. He engulfed my manhood, licking, suckling and engorging mouthfuls of my rod. I could hold back no longer. Pressing his head against my crotch, I released my abundance into his orifice with forceful intensity. Yet he continued to nourish himself on my length; unwilling to relinquish his feed, he greedily guzzled the last drop of my seed down his yearning throat. His sensuality propelled me to share my lingering sustenance from his delectable tongue. We French kissed until we were drunk with the elixir of love. His youthful beauty did not fail to arouse me to another bout of sexual vitality. As I flipped him on his stomach, he lifted his derriere to receive my pulsing organ. He hungered for my entry and I – I was deliriously ready to feed this angelic sprite with my protruding protraction. Gently and lovingly I submerged myself into his person, gyrating slowly to the rhythmic flow of our entangled bewilderment. He opened willingly to my warmth as I plunged inside him, at times fast and furious and at others slow and gentle. In the process I ground his manhood onto the bed, coercing him into ecstatic moans before giving in to cries of whimpering ecstasies. My hand reached around his slender torso, working his hardness to the point of no return. He could not hold off any further. Jets of oozing cum shot onto my stroking palm. His sexiness sent my ejaculation spewing deep inside his opening as he swallowed my dripping seed between his pining fissures. He devoured his own seed from my fingers as I planted caresses on his amorous mouth, sharing every creamy bead of his milkiness between us. He wanted me in him, like I did you, long after our tantalizing desires had subsided. Our friendship took on an intimate significance that night, which we shared over and over again during our time together before Bernard left for Scotland and I to my new dig. Keep your news coming, Andy. Like you, I look forward to receiving your uplifting messages. Love and kisses, Young, Xoxoxo

He observed her a moment, the slender curve of her back and the gentle flare of her hips. She was a lovely creature; he’d noticed from the start.  She was strong, too, as he’d found out when he had grabbed her from behind the day she had arrived. She’d almost kicked out his knees. 

Before she could say more, she looked up to find Cade towering over her. "Do you think they could do one song without us so I might have the pleasure of the next dance?" he asked formally. Lily looked startled and Whitaker frowned, but Anna had just arrived and offered shyly, "I'll play for you, Mrs. Brown. What would you like to hear?" It was settled. Feeling a quiver of excitement, Lily took Cade's hand and rose from the bench. "Do you know 'Molly Cotton-tail'?" It was an easy song, one every child learned, but great fun for dancing. Lily smiled at the child's eager nod. She would finally have a chance to try dancing. Lily's excitement was irresistible. Ignoring the fact that he would most likely get his head blown off for daring to lay a hand to a white woman, Cade led her out to join the dancers. Langton and his wife were there, and they joined the circle beside them. Cade hid his surprise as Maria haughtily joined them, towing one of Lily's farmhands behind her. Maria was a whore at heart, but she hadn't denied him her bed as many another had done before. Cade wouldn't begrudge this offer of friendship now. Unaware that a small cadre of friends and neighbors were forming a protective circle around them, Lily laughed and took Cade's hand as the music began. She had waited for this moment all her life, and she expected to enjoy it to the fullest. She no longer pictured a dream man to sweep her off her feet. She merely wanted to enjoy the music. Cade watched in amazement as Lily spread her wings and flew. She didn't need anyone's protection. The sheer delight on her face as she swung from arm to arm around the circle, her feet scarcely touching the floor, was enough to stop even the hardest heart from treading on her happiness. Cade almost half-believed that life had some meaning beyond mere existence as he watched her. He wouldn't need liquor if he could always feel that kind of joy, even secondhand. Lily collapsed, laughing, into his arms as the music ended. For a moment, Cade was supporting her slenderness against him while she recovered her breath. He had no right being aroused by innocence incarnate, but while Lily laughed, Cade burned. The

So. I’m to be your servant?” I asked in wry amusement.” “Of course. It’s the perfect guise. You’ll be virtually invisible to all the nobility of Buckkeep. Only other servants will speak to you, and as I intend that you will be a downtrodden, overworked, poorly dressed lackey of a supercilious, overbearing, and insufferable young lord, you will have little time to socialize at all.” He suddenly halted and looked back. One slender, long-fingered hand clasped his chin as h looked down his nose at me. His fake brows and knit amber eyes narrowed as he snapped. “And do not dare to meet my eyes, sirrrah! I will tolerate no impertinence. Stand up straight, keep your place, and speak no word without my leave. Are you clear on these instructions?” “Perfectly.” I grinned at him. He continued to glare at me. Then suddenly the glare was replaced by a look of exasperation. “FitzChivalry, the game is up if you cannot play this role and play it to the hilt. Not just when we stand in the Great Hall of Buckkeep, but every moment of every day when there is the remotest chance that we might be seen. I have been Lord Golden since I arrived, but I am still a newcomer to the Queen’s court, and folk will stare. Chade and Queen Kettricken have done all they could to help me in this ruse, Chade because he perceived how useful I might be, and the Queen because she feels I truly deserve to be treated as a lord.” “And no one recognized you?” I broke in incredulously. He cocked his head. “What would they recognize, Fitz? My dead white skin and colorless eyes? My jester’s motley and my painted face? My capers and cavorting and daring witticisms?” “I knew you the moment I saw you,” I reminded him. He smiled warmly. “Just as I knew you, and would know you when first I met you a dozen lives hence. But few others do. Chade with his assassin’s eyes picked me out, and arranged a private audience at which I made myself known to the Queen. A few others have given me curious glances from time to time, but no one would dare to accost Lord Golden and ask him if fifteen years ago he had been King Shrewd’s jester at this selfsame court. My age appears wrong to them, as does my coloring, as does my demeanor, as does my wealth.” “How can they be so blind?” He shook his head and smiled at my ignorance. “Fitz, Fitz. They never even saw me in the first place. They saw only a jester and a freak. I deliberately took no name when first I arrived here. To most of the lords and ladies of Buckkeep, I was just the fool. They heard my jokes and saw my capers, but they never really saw me.” He gave a small sigh. Then he gave me a considering look. “You made it a name. The Fool. And you saw me. You met my eyes when others looked aside, disconcerted.” I saw the tip of his tongue for a second. “Did you never guess how you frightened me? That all my ruses were useless against the eyes of a small boy?

I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night.

I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night. When I had reached the summit, I said to the monk who accompanied me: “Father, how happy you must be here!” And he replied: “It is very windy, Monsieur;

Raven spit into her hands and stumbled forward toward Jacques’s motionless body. “That vampire killed him,” she screamed hysterically. As her hands touched the forest floor, she scooped up handfuls of dirt. “Oh, God, he’s dead. You let that thing kill him!” Using her slender body as a shield so no one could see what she was doing, Raven packed the wounds in Jacques’s throat with the soil and her healing saliva. Drink, Jacques, now, so that you can last until Mikhail and Gregori arrive. Her wrist over his mouth, Raven continued to sob dramatically, thankful for once that so many men often thought women hysterical in a crisis. Mikhail! Jacques is mortally wounded. He is in the sun. She sensed the approach of the human male and twisted her wrist gently in warning. Jacques was so weak, feeding blindly, he nearly missed the signal. His loss of blood was enormous. Even taking as much as he could in those few moments from Raven, she doubted if he could hold on. With great dignity Raven covered his head and her handiwork with her cardigan and bent as if kissing him good-bye. Don’t let me down, Jacques. You must live. For me, for Mikhail, for all of us. Don’t let them win. Even as she sent the words to him, she could detect no pulse, no hint of his heart beating.

professor of archaeology at The Pennsylvania State University, watched the new arrival beside his site manager, assistant professor Amanda Jeffers. Hunter was a slender but weathered forty-five-year-old with longish curling salt and pepper hair that danced in the wind off the Atlantic as if it had a life of its own. Amber-tinted aviator glasses hid his mahogany eyes. He wore heavy work boots, khaki shorts that revealed calves taut as knotted hawsers, a vented white safari shirt, and a multi-pocketed canvas vest more suited to fly-fishing than digging. It had belonged to his father, a digger of another sort: a Pennsylvania coal miner and avid fly-fisherman. Hunter would never admit to being superstitious, but he’d worn the vest on every successful expedition since his father had died of black lung disease a decade ago. Behind Hunter and Jeffers, as if it had grown out of the ground, lay the stone foundations  of Carn Dewes, a prehistoric