Lempriere's Dictionary Read Online Free PDF Page B

temperature, the pouring onto the iron dish. And then began the long polishing. His upper arm ached at the memory. First with saldame, later with water of Depart and powder of Tripolis, the glass would begin to shed its coat of irregularities and the perfect lens within the brute hunk of glass would eventually emerge, its properties locked into its dimensions. He remembered the manufacture of each smooth disk as he dropped them into the slot before the boy’s eyes. Some nights he would press one between his palms, until its slick cold yielded to the heat of his hands and he exchanged it for another.
    For Lemprière, the world was not so much composed of lenses as ceaselessly dispersed by them. As fast as his eyes adjusted to the new world heralded by one pair, it was replaced by another trumpeting its claims, only to be banished in its turn. He would signal his approval or disapproval by saying ‘better’ or ‘worse’, as befitted each case. Ichnabod, after perhapstwo dozen pairs had been tried, stopped. He looked down at the tray, mumbled and seemed to make some brief calculations.
    ‘John Lemprière,’ he announced in magisterial tones, ‘prepare to see.’
    Reaching down to the tray he picked up one of the few remaining pairs. Lemprière heard them click against each other and then against the frames. The stove glowed a malevolent red. The lenses dropped noisily down. His knuckles whitened around the tray.
    ‘Aagh! Get me out! Get me out!’ The tray crashed to the floor. The lenses grasped the room and hurled it at the speed of light into the captive’s face. He let loose a cry of fear. The lenses sucked his eye-balls through the frames, dashed them into the first elected object. The stove. He was in the flames. They were licking greedily at him. He wrestled with the wooden cage. The fire burned hot in his face, behind the flames two eyes caught his, an horrible, misshapen face, a twisted body, eyes black with ancient cruelties, the legs curling and unfurling at him, like serpents. I see you John Lemprière, hissed from each mouth. Erichthonius. Curling and unfurling, like snakes. Like flames. Just flames. Flames in a stove in a room. A room between Minerva’s shrine and Vulcan’s forge.
    ‘Welcome to the visible world, John Lemprière.’
    On the floor between them lay the scattered lenses. They punctuated the grey flagstones like precious stones, gazing up mutely at the two men. Lemprière shivered and blinked. The stove was but a stove, the room but a room. And Ichnabod … Ichnabod was a man with a limp, a genius for glass and too many owls. Lemprière could see.

    Icy waters surged silently eastward beneath the waves, shooting their jets forward, blunting and falling back to be gathered by the tidal force behind. Waters charged with a blind purpose streamed from the unlit, stony basins of the ocean-floor, stabbing through the placid sea ahead, feeling vague, coastal constrictions to either side before slamming against the stubborn peninsula at Cherbourg, scudding against its coast and slipping away into the channel.
    Down from the slate-grey North Sea, channelled through the Dover Straits, raced the rival westward tides. They gathered force, swerved and fought their way through the eastward waters, gouging whorls in the sea’s surface. Sucking currents were shot sideways from the force of the conflict. The mass of two seas met to slice one through the other and in the midst of their battleground, registering the force of each blow and counterblow against its cliffs, stood a rock of granite. Twelve miles long and six mileswide, it surveyed the sub-surface drama of current and cross-current, tidal ebb and flow, and seemed to stand firm against the treacherous waters. The waters might climb forty feet, the tides hauling up the coast, or rage against the cliffs to the north but the red granite was old and hard. It broke through the turf in outcrops all over the island like scars from some elemental