The Rings of Saturn Read Online Free PDF

lingered here or there, I was variously reminded of a pawnbroker’s or an auction hall. And yet it was the sheer number of things, possessions accumulated by generations and now waiting, as it were, for the day when they would be sold off, that won me over to what was, ultimately, a collection of oddities. How uninviting Somerleyton must have been, I reflected, in the days of the industrial impresario Morton Peto, MP, when everything, from the cellar to the attic, from the cutlery to the waterclosets, was brand new, matching in every detail, and in unremittingly good taste. And how fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion. However, on emerging into the open air again, I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.

    The grounds, in contrast to the waning splendour of the house, were now at their evolutionary peak, a century after the heyday of Somerleyton. The flower beds might well have been better tended and more gloriously colourful, but today the trees planted by Morton Peto filled the air above the gardens, and several of the ancient cedars, which were there to be admired by visitors even then, now extended their branches over well-nigh a quarter of an acre, each an entire world unto itself. There were sequoias towering more than sixty yards, and rare oriental planes, the outermost extremities of which had bowed down as low as the lawn, securing a hold where they touched the ground, to shoot up once more in a perfect circle. It was easy to imagine this species of plane tree spreading over the country, just as concentric circles ripple across water, the parents becoming weaker and dying off from within as the progeny conquers the land about them. Some of the lighter-coloured trees seemed to drift like clouds above theparkland. Others were of a deep, impenetrable green. Like terraces the crowns rose one upon another, and if one defocused one’s eyes just slightly it was like looking upon mountains covered with vast forests. Yet the densest and greenest was for me the Somerleyton yew maze, in the heart of the mysterious estate, where I became so completely lost that I could not find the way out again until I resorted to drawing a line with the heel of my boot across the white sand of every hedged passage that had proved to be a dead end. Later, in one of the long hothouses built against the brick walls of the kitchen garden, I struck up a conversation with William Hazel, the gardener who now looks after Somerleyton with the help of several odd-jobmen. When he realized where I was from he told me that during his last years at school, and his subsequent apprenticeship, his thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins. One day when Lord Somerleyton was helping me prune the vines in this greenhouse, for something to do, said Hazel, he explained the Allied carpet-bombing strategy to me, and some time later he broughtme a big relief map of Germany. All the place names I had heard on the news were marked in