(no subject)
And so, after what seemed an infinity to Titus and a whisk of time's skirt to Barquentine, the morning was both fleet and tardy, fructified and like a grape of air, in whose lucent body the earth was for that moment suspended - that phantom ripeness throbbed, that thing called noon.
Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast. It was as though no mechanism on earth could strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stuttered, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices - but the ghost was older.
Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
When every echo had died from even those clocks in the western outcrops, whose posthumous tolling was proverbial, so that the phrase, 'late as a western chime' was common in the castle - when every echo had died, Titus became aware of another sound.
After the languid threnody of the chimes, this fresh sound, so close upon the soft heels of the pendulums, appeared hideously rapid, merciless and impatient.
It had the almost dream-like insistence, for all its actuality, of some hound with feet of stone or iron; or some coursing beast, that, rattling its rapacious and unalterable way in the wake of its prey, was momentarily closing the gap between evil and innocence.
--Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast. It was as though no mechanism on earth could strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stuttered, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices - but the ghost was older.
Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
When every echo had died from even those clocks in the western outcrops, whose posthumous tolling was proverbial, so that the phrase, 'late as a western chime' was common in the castle - when every echo had died, Titus became aware of another sound.
After the languid threnody of the chimes, this fresh sound, so close upon the soft heels of the pendulums, appeared hideously rapid, merciless and impatient.
It had the almost dream-like insistence, for all its actuality, of some hound with feet of stone or iron; or some coursing beast, that, rattling its rapacious and unalterable way in the wake of its prey, was momentarily closing the gap between evil and innocence.
--Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake