Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake Page A

egrets and bitterns congregated.
           This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale blue-green egg shone like a precious stone, or a nest of young, craning their long necks towards the window, their thin bodies covered with powder-down, seemed stage-lit in the beams of the westering sun.
           The late sunbeams shifted across the ragged floor and picked out the long, lustrous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten mantelpiece; and then a whiteness once more as the forehead of an adjacent bird flamed in the shadows... and then, as the light traversed the hall, an alcove was suddenly dancing with the varied bars and blotches and the reddish-yellow of the bitterns.
           As dusk fell, the greenish light intensified in the masonry. Far away, over the roofs, over the outer wall of Gormenghast, over the marshes, the wasteland, the river and the foothills with their woods and spinneys, and over the distant hazes of indeterminate terrain, the claw-shaped head of Gormenghast Mountain shone like a jade carving. In the green air the herons awoke from their trances and from within the hall there came the peculiar chattering and clanking sound of the young as they saw the darkness deepening and knew that it would soon be time for their parents to go hunting.
           Crowded as they had been in their heronry with its domed roof, once golden and green with a painting, but now a dark, disintegrating surface where flakes of paint hung like the wings of moths - yet each bird appeared as a solitary figure as it stepped from the hall to the terrace: each heron, each bittern, a recluse, pacing solemnly forwards on its thin, stiltlike legs.
           Of a sudden in the dusk, knocking as it were a certain hollow note to which their sweet ribs echoed, they were in air - a group of herons, their necks arched back, their ample and rounded wings rising and falling in leisurely flight: and then another and another: and then a night-heron with a ghastly and hair-raising croak: more terrible than the unearthly booming note of a pair of bitterns, who soaring and spiralling upwards and through the clouds to great heights above Gormenghast, boomed like bulls as they ascended.
           The pavement stretched away in greenish darkness. The windows gaped, but nothing moved that was not feathered. And nothing had moved there, save the winds, the hailstones, the clouds, the rain-water and the birds for a hundred years.
           Under the high green clawhead of Gormenghast Mountain the wide stretches of marshland had suddenly become stretches of tension, of watchfulness.
           Each in its own hereditary tract of water the birds stood motionless, with glistening eyes and heads drawn back for the fatal stroke of the dagger-like beak. Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish. In another moment the heron was mounted aloft in august and solemn flight.
           From time to time during the long night these birds returned, sometimes with frogs or water-mice in their beaks or newts or lily buds.
           But now the terrace was empty. On the marshlands every heron was in its place, immobile, ready to plunge its knife. In the hall the nestlings were, for the moment, strangely still.
           The dead quality of the air between the clouds and the earth was strangely portentous. The green, penumbral light played over all things. It had crept into the open mouth of the hall where the silence