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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #landscape
By this time the day had changed in a manner characteristic of the Black Country. I've told you already how in the early morning we got the impression that the sky had been washed by dew and all its impurities drained downward into the lower levels of the coal measures. One reason for this clearness was that the day before had been Sunday, and ninety percent of the smoke stacks were at rest. But all morning the chimneys of Dulston and Wolverbury and Darsall, and all the other congeries of red brick with uncouth names, had been disgorging their fumes of unconsumed carbon and sprays of steam, until a grayish yellow cloud hung over them. There wasn't a breath of wind that day; if it had been left to itself, the stuff would just have settled down on them like soup; but all the time fresh filth went on bubbling up from the bottom, so that the basin gradually filled, with the result that by midday its skimmings had reached the level of our sky. You couldn't see them, and yet they took every bit of colour out of the landscape, just as though we were looking through smoked glass. They were like a poison in our lungs; they made the air we breathed seem flat, devitalized, warm. We could taste their faint acridity with our tongues. All the time this thin, invisible poison came creeping up the slope of the hill. Evelyn spoke of it as a fog; we Londoners know the meaning of an honest fog; but this wasn't a fog, it was a blight. So we walked on through a landscape that was like a spoiled photgraphic plate. We followed the line of the Roman causeway between banks of rusty hazel. The surface of the road had been repaired by a dressing of slag that gave it a feeling of black sterility. The fields that we saw on either side of it, wherever the hedges straggled into gaps, had no greenness in them. They were dotted with mounds of ashes, on which no weeds would grow, and pits of dirty water. No trees but an occasional black and twisted hawthorn. In one field a huge circular boiler of a type that has long since been discarded lay on its side like a stranded buoy. No Man's Land with a vengeance! ↗
I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. ↗
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. ↗
All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing ↗
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all. ↗
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