Descriptive prose
I have a new favourite passage of descriptive prose to add to my list. My first is and has always been the first paragraph of Jack London's White Fang:
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
But now I find that the number two spot must go to a passage near the end of Ian McDowell's Merlin's Gift:
My bare island had a music I've heard nowhere else; the melody hummed by the never-distant waves that murmured just beyond every hill and boomed when Mother Ocean smashed her protean self upon the black and jagged rocks; the insinuating whisper of the coarse brown grass and the rhythmic plaint of the buildings whose timbers groaned and creaked as much as those of any swell-tossed ship; the sailor songs of all the seabirds that soared on the wet salt wind or roosted in the tumbled stacks of basalt that the storm-driven sea had cut from the broken cliffs. It was a world of peat and grass and pebble, forever bounded by salt water and salt air.
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
But now I find that the number two spot must go to a passage near the end of Ian McDowell's Merlin's Gift:
My bare island had a music I've heard nowhere else; the melody hummed by the never-distant waves that murmured just beyond every hill and boomed when Mother Ocean smashed her protean self upon the black and jagged rocks; the insinuating whisper of the coarse brown grass and the rhythmic plaint of the buildings whose timbers groaned and creaked as much as those of any swell-tossed ship; the sailor songs of all the seabirds that soared on the wet salt wind or roosted in the tumbled stacks of basalt that the storm-driven sea had cut from the broken cliffs. It was a world of peat and grass and pebble, forever bounded by salt water and salt air.