Sleep Has His House

A soft antique rain falls. Twilight. The colours lavender to pigeon and pearl grey with the delicate green of a weeping willow tree on the left. Behind the willow hangs the suggestion of a cascade. In the middle distance, centrally placed, a small hill with a tomb—a simple shrine, it looks like—at the top.

This is clearly the source from which the yellow artist in the boat draws his inspiration. The picture is finished. He holds it up and smiles at the complicated fantasy evolved by his brush-strokes. He smiles, the smile growing unclear as a breaker shatters its glassy curve on the reef, and a miniature rainbow, a storm-dog, slowly dissolves in spray over his head

spines, tentacles, filaments, helmets, swords; with appendages like trailing banners; with veils, periscopes, carapaces, suckers, pincers, razors, nets.

They are equipped with every conceivable variation of colour, texture and form: with frills, fans, fringes,

tlemented with shells of peculiar shapes and colours, parks and thickets of weed and gardens of lacy crimson sea-fern. The inhabitants of these subaqueous regions pass under the boat serenely on their mysterious business. Some are beautiful creations, some grotesque, some delicate as spun glass, others clumsy like the outcome of a bungled experiment; some baleful, some amusing, some benign; some fearsome or weird in their exaggerated strangeness.

And now the swells rear into monsters plunging thunderously to the shore; but the boat has passed the protecting reef and floats on the shallow water. Here through a sparkling window the sea-floor can be seen, coral citadels, bat

watch the darkness flower into transient symbols.