deKlend’s knowledge, this storied family consists in Julien and his sister Angela, a big oafish woman with steel-grey hair who stomps around in old brogans and short khaki pants. A few inches of wide, mayonnaisey knees peep out from above the tops of her long stockings, made from black sponges.
Manoah attires himself in the most insanely flamboyant style deKlend has ever seen. He teases his pale red hair out until it radiates from his head in a fantastic ginger corona that would have made a thinner man look like a giant dandelion. His broad, flat upper lip is smooth and a little oily; he has a carroty goatee and a ruddy-purplish, terra-cotta complexion. Everything he wears is copious, flowing, gauzy, flame-colored, and surmounted by capes with stiff collars, so he always looks as if his head, wanly flaming, had broken through, and gotten stuck in, the bottom of a decoratively-ornamented colander. He keeps his hands in magnificent condition; the nails gleam like opal flakes — but deKlend’s are still more beautiful. Manoah snatches papers from him without turning toward him, nostrils flickering, and without swivelling his piggy little eyes. deKlend thinks he is jealous.
Scuttlebutt solemnly avers there is a wife somewhere, although it is hard to imagine what species of womanhood would freely join herself to such a creature, but evidently it was, and still might nearly be, a great aesthetickal affair of the heart. According to rumor, she, who is never reliably named but could be anything from Yvelynne to Mulcybirette, is a votary of the muse. Her sensibilities are of such a lofty delicacy that she foreswears to commit her works to writing, let alone anything so vulgar as print. The hieroglyphs of her virtually imperceptible melodies are written only with the ethereal pencil of subtle, starlike inspiration on the tenuous pages of her memory, and she herself is never seen.
As a rule, Manoah holds diwan during his prolonged imperial baths and expects his retainers and attendants to take notes and recite information to him while he talks suavely on a meerschaum phone or as he scrubs and salves his acres of pink flab.
“Every night at midnight, Manoah strips naked, puts a tasselled hat on, hops into bed, and reads slave narratives. He’s a completely unreasonable person.”
deKlend overhears most of this from the staff quidnuncs and the rest from Nardac, the art historian. She’s an elderly woman, completely bald, who wears caftans and ungainly jewelery.
Nardac seems to take to deKlend.
Come have a look at our gardens.
— gardens, — gardens, — gardens.
Looking up at the brownish nothingness overhead, deKlend experiences horror, and for a moment seems about to suffocate under the heavy lid. This impression fades, without entirely disappearing, as he walks with Nardac. She talks at random about the gardens, the whrounims, the scene.
The overhanging mountains are filled with haunted houses, and from a distance one can often make out people fleeing from one or another of them, aghast. In their frenzy to escape they often collide with each other at crossroads. Traffic congestion is at its worst around midnight. In recent years this problem has diminished a bit with the establishment of a refugee network, by means of which the gastered visitors rotate from one haunted house to another, in the belief that one who has been marked for destruction by a particular house is thereby immunized against the depredations of any other.
The grafticulture of the whrounims is unbelievably developed. The trees fold into each other, the forest canopy is all multicolored roses instead of leaves, and the gloom beneath them, velvety with petals, is so overpoweringly fragrant the smell burns in the eyes and nose with a sugary heat. They stroll the corpse way, where the path is lined with false charnel pits filled with plants that naturally take the shape of dead bodies, and that burst into huge stink blossoms, sickly pink leather
Manoah attires himself in the most insanely flamboyant style deKlend has ever seen. He teases his pale red hair out until it radiates from his head in a fantastic ginger corona that would have made a thinner man look like a giant dandelion. His broad, flat upper lip is smooth and a little oily; he has a carroty goatee and a ruddy-purplish, terra-cotta complexion. Everything he wears is copious, flowing, gauzy, flame-colored, and surmounted by capes with stiff collars, so he always looks as if his head, wanly flaming, had broken through, and gotten stuck in, the bottom of a decoratively-ornamented colander. He keeps his hands in magnificent condition; the nails gleam like opal flakes — but deKlend’s are still more beautiful. Manoah snatches papers from him without turning toward him, nostrils flickering, and without swivelling his piggy little eyes. deKlend thinks he is jealous.
Scuttlebutt solemnly avers there is a wife somewhere, although it is hard to imagine what species of womanhood would freely join herself to such a creature, but evidently it was, and still might nearly be, a great aesthetickal affair of the heart. According to rumor, she, who is never reliably named but could be anything from Yvelynne to Mulcybirette, is a votary of the muse. Her sensibilities are of such a lofty delicacy that she foreswears to commit her works to writing, let alone anything so vulgar as print. The hieroglyphs of her virtually imperceptible melodies are written only with the ethereal pencil of subtle, starlike inspiration on the tenuous pages of her memory, and she herself is never seen.
As a rule, Manoah holds diwan during his prolonged imperial baths and expects his retainers and attendants to take notes and recite information to him while he talks suavely on a meerschaum phone or as he scrubs and salves his acres of pink flab.
“Every night at midnight, Manoah strips naked, puts a tasselled hat on, hops into bed, and reads slave narratives. He’s a completely unreasonable person.”
deKlend overhears most of this from the staff quidnuncs and the rest from Nardac, the art historian. She’s an elderly woman, completely bald, who wears caftans and ungainly jewelery.
Nardac seems to take to deKlend.
Come have a look at our gardens.
— gardens, — gardens, — gardens.
Looking up at the brownish nothingness overhead, deKlend experiences horror, and for a moment seems about to suffocate under the heavy lid. This impression fades, without entirely disappearing, as he walks with Nardac. She talks at random about the gardens, the whrounims, the scene.
The overhanging mountains are filled with haunted houses, and from a distance one can often make out people fleeing from one or another of them, aghast. In their frenzy to escape they often collide with each other at crossroads. Traffic congestion is at its worst around midnight. In recent years this problem has diminished a bit with the establishment of a refugee network, by means of which the gastered visitors rotate from one haunted house to another, in the belief that one who has been marked for destruction by a particular house is thereby immunized against the depredations of any other.
The grafticulture of the whrounims is unbelievably developed. The trees fold into each other, the forest canopy is all multicolored roses instead of leaves, and the gloom beneath them, velvety with petals, is so overpoweringly fragrant the smell burns in the eyes and nose with a sugary heat. They stroll the corpse way, where the path is lined with false charnel pits filled with plants that naturally take the shape of dead bodies, and that burst into huge stink blossoms, sickly pink leather
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