The Bedlam Stacks

What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead. 'Beg pardon?' 'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.

But Spanish and English aren't different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It's almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I'd tried to do that in Chinese I'd come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.

Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet.

He laughed. It showed how he had been when he was younger. Mild-mannered and handsome. In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t crude work but the ruin of something fine. The same as everything else here. I felt ashamed for not having noticed before. There was a knack to seeing how things had used to be but I’d never had it; I was no archaeologist. The new understanding lit up the edges of my mind and like always they were closer and more worn than I would have liked or thought.

It's good for a person to be terrorized by a goat. Hard to get high and mighty when there's something chasing you for vegetables

Being mad isn't an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?

I’ve forgotten a lot. If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.

People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t a crude work but the ruin of something fine.

What's the point of you?' 'I'm ornamental.' 'Sit down and don't touch anything.

If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

People are like bees. They're all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can't be reversed. A bee that's half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages.

Familiar devils are important after a while, though, aren’t they? Better than nothing,’ I said, and then shook my head. I could hear how incoherent I sounded but I couldn’t see a way to sort it

In bright light, with his hair turned that dark red and never having regained all the colour in his skin, he looked nationless.

I felt the way I did when I was about to dive into deep water. The last pause was to look for shadows that might be rocks. There were plenty that might have been, but nothing broke the surface and the more I looked the fewer there were.

He looked worried, like he had just watched a boy flicking pebbles at something in a zoo with flimsy fences.

I didn’t say that I thought Clem was a bad translator, or that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an impassable gulf in the thinking of two human beings. Of course you couldn’t translate everything, but you could damn well explicate, particularly if you both spoke such a sprawling monster of a language as English.

All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian's Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground.

it’s yours until it makes an appearance in the world. It’s yours in the same way your liver is; you wouldn’t catch me telling you what to do or not do about that. I’d suggest not drinking heavily or taking a lot of opium, but you know.

Beyond was that open air and the looming blackness of the forest.

It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of being a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water.

I still couldn’t decide whether I should believe him or not. But I was too tired and too cold to argue, and for that moment at least I loved him for having made the idea of the funeral that bit less heavy, like he had put his shoulder under mine to share the weight.

Thank you,’ I said, feeling shabby and English in the falling-apart, ill-looking way English people always seem whenever you stand them next to someone from a healthier latitude.

there were no feathers left, only a roasted carcass. He lifted it out of the water and tore off a leg. ‘It’s cooked, try it.’ ‘What . . . in God’s name was that?’ ‘It’s how they make glass eggs. They’re full of flammable chemicals and then when the time’s right . . .’ He opened his hand to mime an explosion. ‘But if you startle them they go off pretty well too.’ ‘They’re phoenixes.

Lucky to see it,’ she said. ‘The forest must like Mr Markham. It’s very lucky for the quicksilver trees to cry at a funeral.

but it was a Pyrrhic victory now it was here.