quotes_sep23_2012.htm

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together … This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it— bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went to work. India was awake…

This is from Kim.

Kim and the Lama are waking up from their resting-place on the Grand Trunk Road, and Kim is rejoicing in the sights and sounds around him.

Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

This is from ” ‘They’ ” in Traffics and Discoveries.

The narrator has set out from home to explore the Sussex countryside. Later he happens on a beautiful old house, haunted by the ghosts of dead children, including his own …

…The sun was just clear of the horizon they had not seen for nearly a week, and his low red light struck into the riding-sails of three fleets of anchored schooners—one to the north, one to the westward, and one to the south. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, of every possible make and build, with, far away, a square-rigged Frenchman, all bowing and courtesying one to the other. From every boat dories were dropping away like bees from a crowded hive; and the clamour of voices, the rattling of ropes and blocks, and the splash of the oars carried for miles across the heaving water. The sails turned all colours, black, pearly-grey, and white, as the sun mounted; and more boats swung up through the mists to the southward.

This is from Captains Courageous.

Towards the end of her fishing season, after weeks alone on the Grand Banks, the We’re Here meets up with the fleet of fishing schooners.