quotes_nov29_2015.htm

Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cart-wheels and the bullocks’ horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.

This is from Kim, soon after he and the Lama had joined the Sahiba and her entourage on the Grand Trunk Road.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-floors..

This is from “The Miracle of Purun Baghat”, in The Second Jungle Book.

Purun Dass has abandoned his roile as a senior official to become a wandering holy man. Here he is cilmbing into the high hills, to find a place where he can settle down and meditate.

As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of clipped yew. Across the lawn—the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile.

This is from “They”, in Traffics and Discoveries.

The narrator, exploring in his car across Sussex, happens on a beautiful old house among the woods. He does not know yet that it is haunted by the ghosts of dead children.