When the sun is low in the sky west of Bassett a peculiar light shines in the panel of greenish-gold glass in the Killeaton’s front door. Creatures neither green nor gold but more richly coloured than any grass or sun try to find their way home through a land where cities of unpredictable shapes and colours rise up on the plains of fiery haze, then vanish just as quickly while some of their inhabitants flee towards promises of other plains where cities may appear whose glancing colours will sometimes recall for those few who reach them certain glimpses of the places that have gone, and others still make their way across familiar vistas not knowing that the towers and walls they are looking for no longer stand.
While Clement watches the creatures, the sun moves away from Bassett but not before it has exposed across every plain and beneath every hill and through every city and within every creature, and even perhaps in the inaccessible region beyond all countries, streaks or tinges of a colour that none of the creatures seems to have seen although it alone might easily obliterate them all and the countries they love. As the very last light leaves his front door the boy realises that if only the creatures had discovered this colour things might have gone differently with their journeys.
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row, 1974
While Clement watches the creatures, the sun moves away from Bassett but not before it has exposed across every plain and beneath every hill and through every city and within every creature, and even perhaps in the inaccessible region beyond all countries, streaks or tinges of a colour that none of the creatures seems to have seen although it alone might easily obliterate them all and the countries they love. As the very last light leaves his front door the boy realises that if only the creatures had discovered this colour things might have gone differently with their journeys.
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row, 1974