Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. “Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. The accent was of so weird a lilt that at first Steerpike could not recognize more than one sentence in three, but he had quickly attuned himself to the original cadence and as the words fell into place Steerpike realised he was staring at a poet.”

It would not have surprised him if it had dropped off, so toylike was its angle.Īs he watched, fascinated, the mouth opened and a voice as strange and deep as the echo of a lugubrious ocean stole out into the morning.

Steerpike watched it turn upon the neck slowly. This head, set at a long incline upon a neck as wry as a turtle's cut across the narrow vertical black strip of the window. The eyes in whose expression might be read the unending grudge they bore against the nose were as small as marbles and peered out between the grey grass of the hair. It was forced by not only the unfriendly monopoly of the nose, but also by the tapering character of the head to be a short mouth but it obvious by its very nature that, under normal conditions, it would have covered twice the area. The mouth was forced by the lie of the terrain left to it, to slant at an angle which gave to its right-hand side an expression of grim amusement and to its left, which dipped downwards across the chin, a remorseless twist.

The nose had evidently been first upon the scene and had spread itself down the entire length of the wedge, beginning among the grey stubble of the hair and ending among the grey stubble of the beard, and spreading on both sides with a ruthless disregard for the eyes and mouth which found precarious purchase. It was a wedge, a sliver, a grotesque slice in which it seemed the features had been forced to stake their claims, and it appeared that they had done so in a great hurry and with no attempt to form any kind of symmetrical pattern for their mutual advantage.

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