"A Time of Gifts"

[fiefoe]

Sights:

• The skaters on the canals... were suddenly scattered as a wind-borne portent came whirling out of the distance and tore through their midst like a winged dragon. It was an ice-yacht - a raft on four rubber-tyred wheels under a taut triangle of sail and manned by three reckless boys... It screamed past with an uproar of shouts as the teeth bit the ice and a noise like the rending of a hundred calico shirts which multiplied to a thousand as the raft made a sharp right-angle turn into a branch-canal. A minute later, it was a faraway speck and the silent landscape, with its Brueghelish skaters circling as slowly as flies along the canals and the polders, seemed tamer after its passing.
• As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking.
• The sensation of wintry but glowing interior space, the airiness of the snowy convolutions, the twirl of the metal foliage and the gilt of the arabesques were all made more buoyant still by reflections from the real snow that lay untrodden outside; it came glancing up through the panes, diffusing a still and muted luminosity: a northern variant (I thought years later) of the reflected flicker that canals, during Venetian siestas, send up across the cloud-born apotheoses and rapes that cover the ceiling.
• (In moonlight): the thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods.

Salzburg: bell-towers, bridges, piazzas, fountains, a dome or two and an impression of cloisters which might all have been flown here
by djinns and reassembled as an Italian Renaissance city the wrong side of the Alps.
Linz: the entire town was built for pleasure and splendour. Beauty, space and amenity lay all about.

__ The window of an outfitter's shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hilter Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men;
__ (In his shrine of Hiteriana,) He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other.

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