buildings, people – observing perhaps quite as much if not more than he actually drew, keeping all forms, animate or inanimate, in his head, playing around with them, distorting, rethinking them, and setting them on paper at last, if ever he did, transformed by his feelings and impressions; forms both remembered and remade.
These expeditions, however, were not only strictly solitary but usually as early in the morning as the zoo opened. He had been planning this trip alone too – attracted as much as repelled by the prospect of the crowds, because he had meant to observe them as closely as he observed the animals – but his mother had seized on it as a means of paying back yesterday’s hospitality by Penn’s parents. (Penn’s mother had given them all supper after the tournament.) Hugh had protested of course, but less than he would have done ordinarily, because his wish to be solitary had been partly overlaid by the compulsion to be with the other three. He had no choice in any case, the matter was decided by his mother, which for once made things easier. She gave Hugh money for all of them and a picnic lunch, rather untidily wrapped. She also gave him three letters to post, because she said she would like them to have the zoo postmark on.
Penn had been angry about the zoo at first; he considered it childish. But he could offer no better suggestion, and when it came to it, all four being in a curiously dreamlike state that day, the zoo seemed as good a place to dream as anywhere. Even the ordinary animals seemed creatures of fantasy, and the stranger ones had never appeared so extraordinary; elongations, distortions, incredibilities; long-necked giraffes and long-nosed elephants, loose-limbed gibbons swinging hand over hand from rail to rail to rail, seals sliding into and through the water, smooth-skinned, rubbery (they barked and splashed, but the movements were unrelated, entirely silent); striped tigers; and lions, lions, thought Hugh, and pushed the thought of lions away, deliberately.
He went to the elephant house. House felt the wrong word though, it was more like being underground in an eccentrically lit and hewn-out cave, or like the crypt of a castle (Hugh wished he could stop thinking of castles, too.) There were staged areas of orange light, in which, framed by pillars, wrinkled, primaeval-looking creatures stood, elephants and rhinoceroses, their every wrinkle having definition and importance. Hugh felt as if he had never properly looked at either animal before. They were dusted most of them with yellow sand, this thicker in the cracks and wrinkles, and looked more like reptiles than animals with their naked skins and little, sunken eyes. They looked like that pig, Hugh thought, and again wished that he had not.
He stood and stared at one rhinoceros, bigger than the rest; it stared back with surprisingly mild-looking eyes, almost benevolent.
“Wouldn’t like him for breakfast,” a girl said behind Hugh and giggled. Hugh did not turn around, but glowered to himself.
There was a trench between animals and onlookers, a shallow trench with steps down into it and short stone blocks lining the centre, like old-fashioned milestones. It was scarcely a barrier. He and the rhinoceros might have been in the same dimension, there seemed nothing to stop Hugh reaching it, or it reaching him. It felt familiar suddenly, and then Hugh realized that it was like standing on the hill looking across at the castle. As then, he seemed close and yet remote. When there came sudden movement, he even expected it to be a man on horseback, but it was only a little girl who ran down from the viewing floor and clutched at one of the stone blocks in the trench. Hugh gasped, moved to snatch her from danger, his sense of alarm heightened by what he had been imagining. But no one else seemed to think it dangerous. A man walked down the steps and brought the child back on his shoulders, smiling, while behind him the rhinoceros
These expeditions, however, were not only strictly solitary but usually as early in the morning as the zoo opened. He had been planning this trip alone too – attracted as much as repelled by the prospect of the crowds, because he had meant to observe them as closely as he observed the animals – but his mother had seized on it as a means of paying back yesterday’s hospitality by Penn’s parents. (Penn’s mother had given them all supper after the tournament.) Hugh had protested of course, but less than he would have done ordinarily, because his wish to be solitary had been partly overlaid by the compulsion to be with the other three. He had no choice in any case, the matter was decided by his mother, which for once made things easier. She gave Hugh money for all of them and a picnic lunch, rather untidily wrapped. She also gave him three letters to post, because she said she would like them to have the zoo postmark on.
Penn had been angry about the zoo at first; he considered it childish. But he could offer no better suggestion, and when it came to it, all four being in a curiously dreamlike state that day, the zoo seemed as good a place to dream as anywhere. Even the ordinary animals seemed creatures of fantasy, and the stranger ones had never appeared so extraordinary; elongations, distortions, incredibilities; long-necked giraffes and long-nosed elephants, loose-limbed gibbons swinging hand over hand from rail to rail to rail, seals sliding into and through the water, smooth-skinned, rubbery (they barked and splashed, but the movements were unrelated, entirely silent); striped tigers; and lions, lions, thought Hugh, and pushed the thought of lions away, deliberately.
He went to the elephant house. House felt the wrong word though, it was more like being underground in an eccentrically lit and hewn-out cave, or like the crypt of a castle (Hugh wished he could stop thinking of castles, too.) There were staged areas of orange light, in which, framed by pillars, wrinkled, primaeval-looking creatures stood, elephants and rhinoceroses, their every wrinkle having definition and importance. Hugh felt as if he had never properly looked at either animal before. They were dusted most of them with yellow sand, this thicker in the cracks and wrinkles, and looked more like reptiles than animals with their naked skins and little, sunken eyes. They looked like that pig, Hugh thought, and again wished that he had not.
He stood and stared at one rhinoceros, bigger than the rest; it stared back with surprisingly mild-looking eyes, almost benevolent.
“Wouldn’t like him for breakfast,” a girl said behind Hugh and giggled. Hugh did not turn around, but glowered to himself.
There was a trench between animals and onlookers, a shallow trench with steps down into it and short stone blocks lining the centre, like old-fashioned milestones. It was scarcely a barrier. He and the rhinoceros might have been in the same dimension, there seemed nothing to stop Hugh reaching it, or it reaching him. It felt familiar suddenly, and then Hugh realized that it was like standing on the hill looking across at the castle. As then, he seemed close and yet remote. When there came sudden movement, he even expected it to be a man on horseback, but it was only a little girl who ran down from the viewing floor and clutched at one of the stone blocks in the trench. Hugh gasped, moved to snatch her from danger, his sense of alarm heightened by what he had been imagining. But no one else seemed to think it dangerous. A man walked down the steps and brought the child back on his shoulders, smiling, while behind him the rhinoceros
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