The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (9 page)

The sparks were not a pattern on a dark ground, they were themselves the background, that of a flaming evening sky. The black lines, and stripes upon it, were the lower branches of a fir thicket; these branches were dead and bare because the growth was so dense that no light reached down here.

The tattoos were freshened by the air. Oriental dragons climbed Karp’s arm, green claws splayed from his feet, ink-blue women wrapped around the columns of his thighs, and with each steamy breath the vulture picked at his heart. More vivid were the whitening scars, dead stripes on his chest, where the accusations had been burned away. Across his narrow brow spread a livid band.

She had gone into the sea, touched bottom and returned with no apparent signs of corruption aside from the stillness of death. After the tension of rigor mortis all flesh became slack on the bone: breasts sagged on the ribs, mouth and jaw were loose, eyes flattened under half-open lids, the skin bore a luminous pallor mottled with bruises.

Regular transverse division of black and white bands, and interchange of white and black in the spaces marked off, produce a chessboard, counterchange pattern, unless a band of foliated ornament is placed so as to alternate with the chequering. A chequered black and white stripe set against a plain black one would again lead us astray, giving the simple cross-band design shown....

... she could only look out at the brown marshes and the million black factories and the puddly streets of towns and a rusty steamboat in a canal and barns and Bull Durham signs and roundfaced Spearmint gnomes all barred and crisscrossed with bright flaws of rain. The jeweled stripes on the window ran straight down when the train stopped and got more and more oblique as it speeded up.

They lay on a ledge high upon the sunny east slope and looked out to the north through the notch cut as sharply as a wedge out of a pie. Far below them the golden plain spread level, golden-tawny grass and golden-green wheat checker-boarded in a pattern as wide as the world.

The blossom-covered surface of the river is smooth, stretched taut from bank to bank like a polka-dotted fabric. The prow of the boat rips a passage through with a sizzling hiss. KEN KESEY,
Sometimes a Great Notion

The bedstead, chairs, and lounges, were of bamboo, wrought in peculiarly graceful and fanciful patterns. Over the head of the bed was an alabaster bracket, on which a beautiful sculptured angel stood, with drooping wings, holding out a crown of myrtle-leaves. From this depended, over the bed, light curtains of rose-colored gauze, striped with silver, supplying that protection from mosquitos which is an indispensable addition to all sleeping accommodation in that climate.

Every bed was covered with a woven mat, our only bedding during the months of constant wet heat. And the hot bricks of the courtyard were crisscrossed with bamboo paths.

Where the curving hills scalloped the edge of the light-blue sky Mount Egmont soared ten thousand feet, sloping into the clouds, its sides still white with snow, its symmetry so perfect that even those like Frank who saw it every day of their lives never ceased to marvel.

Later he stared at his finished work and longed to know if anyone other than Mr. Cromarty would be able to make sense of the miniature circles, dashes, and curlicues that floated freely above the lines with their sudden cruel hooks.

... Hunt never commented on her appearance again, though a year later he gave her a present—a long, thin, limp, old silk scarf, with slanted ends and a black border and a small geometric pattern of green, beige and white checks and diamonds, a scarf from the thirties, which smelt faintly of age and old-fashioned face powder and cats and sawdust.

He leaned over the side, gritting his teeth; a sunken brown channel, ending in a fragment of discoloured paper, lay across a light patch in the pattern of a valuable-looking rug. This made him feel very unhappy, a feeling sensibly increased when he looked at the bedside table. This was marked by two black, charred grooves, greyish and shiny in parts, lying at right angles and stopping well short of the ashtray, which held a single used match.