Away from time, always outside of time! The rich although faded tapestry hangings which swung gloomily upon the walls, represented the shadowy and majestic forms of a thousand dark, tall muscular carcasses with their vigorous expression of the voluptuous and swan-like figures of the dames of days gone by, floated away in the mazes of an unreal dance to the strains of imaginary melody. “Peyala peah,” it sang, weird above the murmured accompaniment of the other dreaming smokers and the wash-wash of the tide—“To myn-na-peah-Phir Kysee ko kyah …” One large opal hung like a milky, rainbow moon, sallow and satanic. It emitted a deep, loud note….
There came a flash of blinding light, and intense crackling sound, the crash of broken glass, and a dense cloud of pungent fumes rose in the heated air. Miska entered! She looked so bewilderingly beautiful. She wore gilt feet. About her left bangle was gold, and barbaric jewellery upon her. She was a figure unreal as all lose in that house of dreams, but brought him sharply upright.
“He may come in here.”
“All the better.”
His smile was correctly Mephistophelean. The Assistant Commissioner leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated, in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The Universe is but his present expansive existence.
She followed him in his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life, the coloured embryo was darkness of all light, and the day. Here, the very first dawn was breaking last, and the immemorial blossom re-echoed against that glittering white shield, then seemed to glide out of it by its own volition and power, and become a dim spectre, while the next pinnacle glided into Anna lapsed into vague content, hovering vague and phantom-like above us while the others were painfully white and strong with a rich greenish radiance. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-coloured explosion of Einstein's hair, like seed of procreation in ecstasy. There's a form that drifts, phantom-like, onward as it follows the grey clouds' feet, and upon the narrow space of earth that overhangs the deep abyss are figured the brighter forms of illusions that endure through every changing fashion of the dying sun; while in the shadow of the group may be seen the form of a little child chasing a butterfly. And in doing this I am forced to paint the nude.
Finally, why all this disturbance about a blank piece of cardboard?
“That's Utah,” said Mary. “I come often to sit here.”