“Indeed, Gabriel knew it wasn't all just empty green fields of moorland grass for miles around. Tucked within the wide landscapes of these uplands was an unpredictability that a less observant person might never be aware of. There were waterfalls concealed in swaths of wilderness, rocky stream beds ramblings in deep valleys, and...knotted sheets?”

“White on rice. Green on grass. Sheets on a bed. Him on her.”

“The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines. We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.”

“Silver flow the streams from Celos to EruiIn the green fields of Lebennin!Tall grows the grass there. In the wind from the SeaThe white lilies sway,And the golden bells are shaken of mallos and alfirinIn the green fields of Lebennin,In the wind from the Sea!”

“We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.”

“Her nightgown lay upon the snow as it might on a bed sheet, and the tracks that led from where it lay were never of human feet... An empty bed still waits for him as he lies in a crimson tide. Beware, beware, oh trapper men, beware of a griesly bride.”