"Titus Groan"

[fiefoe]

What's a good gothic without heavy atmosphere?

• no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue.
• this slow pulp of summer
• Distance was everywhere - the sense of far-away - of detachment. what might have been touched with an outstretched arm was equally removed, withdrawn in the grey-blue polliniferous body of the air... Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered.
• the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them
• Distance had no meaning... The mountain was neither far away nor was it close at hand. It arose starkly, enormously, across the lens of the eye. The hollow itself was a cup of light. Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority... each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling.
• The ferment of the heart, ...was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. .. for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all.
  

<'...well-versed actor on the mouldering stage, and the slow drama of Gormenghast continued among shadows.'>
__ ragged to the extent of being filigree
__ His two-handed cleaver had an edge to it which sang with the voice of a gnat
__ (The aunts) gazed up at Steerpike with a row of four equidistant eyes. There was no reason why there should not have been forty, or four hundred of them. It so happened that only four had been removed from a dead and endless frieze whose inexhaustible and repetitive them was forever, eyes, eyes, eyes.

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