spacious rooms;
reptile-skin carpets;
mounted animal skulls;
crimson-draped walls;
balcony view of garden and Ardaig;
garden reminiscent of Japanese;
gray stone buildings;
fantastic turrets and battlements;
estates on the hills;
high modern buildings on the bay;
cargo ships and a jet;
nonessential traffic banned in this sacred Old Quarter.
Falkayn finds the decor disquieting but is by now well accustomed to alienness. As I have mentioned before, he remains perfectly relaxed while conversing with bizarrely shaped beings.
In this post, I have summarized two paragraphs of "Day of Burning." I suspect that Poul Anderson imagined all these details from the carved snake bannister to the sacred Old Quarter while writing these paragraphs and that we as readers usually forget them as soon as we move on to the dialogue between Falkayn and his servant.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I wonder how WE would do, confronted face to face with non human intelligent beings from other planets? I hope my reaction would be fascinated interest with just a touch of caution! And that I would not panic!
I'm one of those persons who actually hopes to see a real UFO! Such as my partial namesake in "Peek! I See You!"
Commenting on your last paragraph. True, we readers DO tend to overlook interesting details like the carved banister. It's one of Anderson's trademarks as a skilled writer that he nonetheless puts in such details--because they add nuance, depth, even verisimilitude to the stories he writes. Writers who don't bother much about backgrounds tend to be flat and colorless.
Sean
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