ابن الوقت - صفحہ نمبر144

کوئ ساڑھے پانچ بجتے بجتے کچہری سے سوار ہوا تو سیدھا میرٹھ کی سڑک کو ہو لیا۔ آفتاب تھا پس پشت اور ٹھنڈی ٹھنڈی پورا ہوا سامنے سے آرہی تھی۔ شاہ درے سے بھی کوئ کوس ڈیڑھ کوس آگے نکل گیا تھا کہ آفتاب نیچے لٹک آیا۔ چاندنی رات کے خیال سے دل تو ابھی لوٹنے کو نہیں چاہتا تھا مگر جمنا پر کشتیوں کا پل تھا؛ یہ تصوّر ہوا ایسا نہ ہو تاریکی میں گھوڑے کا پاوں کہیں کسی گھڑے میں جا رہے۔

Thousand Cranes - pg. 65

Kikuji sat by the telephone with his eyes closed.
He saw the evening sun as he had seen it after the night with Mrs. Ota: the evening sun through the train windows, behind the grove of the Hommonji Temple.
The red sun seemed about to flow down over the branches.
The grove stood dark against it.
The sun flowing over the branches sank into his tired eyes, and he closed them.
The white cranes from the Inamura girl's kerchief flew across the evening sun, which was still in his eyes.

Voss - pg. 414

Moonlight was of doubtful benefit when it came, because all night the spirits of the dead were with him. The thin soul of Turner was hanging like a possum, by its tail, from a tree. There was a cracking of sticks and whips by Mr. Angus, who would rise up very close in a huge, white, blunt pillar of flurry light. The boy thought he would not be able to endure it, and was pouring sand upon his head. When daylight came, his eyes were turned up, and the rims of his eyelids staring outward, in a kind of fit. But he soon recovered in the heat of the morning, and continued eastward, talking to himself of what he had seen.

Voss - pg. 138

Already the evening of his arrival, upon scenes of splendour such as he had known to exist, but never met, Frank Le Mersurier had begun to change. The sun's sinking had dissolved all hardnesses. Darkness, however, had not fallen; it seemed, rather, to well forth, like the beating and throbbing of heart and pulse in the young man's body, to possess the expectant hills. Only the admirable house resisted. Later that night he had gone outside to watch the light from the lamps and candles, with which every window appeared to be filled. Isolation made that rather humble light both moving and desirable. So the days began to explain. Grasses were melting and murmuring. A child laid its cheek against him. The sun, magnificently imperious, was yet a simple circle that allowed him to enter, with the result that he was both blinded and illuminated.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 133

It rained intermittently all night. Early in the morning it became a regular downpour. Villagers who had stayed up most of the night fell asleep in the monotonous patter of rain and the opiate of the fresh morning breeze.

Train To Pakistan - pg. 91

The sun makes an ally of the breeze. It heats the air till it becomes the loo and then sends it on its errand. Even in the intense heat, the loo's warm caresses are sensuous and pleasant. It brings up the prickly heat. It produces a numbness which makes the head nod and the eyes heavy with sleep. It brings on a stroke which takes its victim as gently as breeze bears a fluff of thistledown.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 245

When Frau Hentjen got up the dawn was just breaking. She opened the window to see how the day promised. The sky arched clear and cloudless over the dark, grey, yard, which lay below her in motionless silence, a little rectangle within dark walls. The clean washtubs from last washing day were still standing down there. A cool wind, imprisoned between the walls, smelt of the city.

Wolf Hall - pg. 515

He watches him melt into the crowd of home-going aldermen. He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe. We must find some way for him to do it, that doesn't depend on abjection. The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as spring breaks from the dead tree.

An Imaginary Life - Opening

IT is the desolateness of this place that day after day fills my mind with its perspectives. A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To the west and south, mountains, heaped under cloud. To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands, rolling level to the pole.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 1996

Copyright 1978 by David Malouf

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by George Braziller, Inc., New York, in 1978.

Printed in the United States of America

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 15

This blue, indolent town. Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels  lying in the corners. The uneven curbstones, their edges worn away. A town of doctors, all with large houses. Cousson, Proby, Gilot. Even the streets are named for them. Passageways through the Roman wall. The Porte de Breuil, its iron railings sunk into the  stone like climber's spikes. The women come up the steep grade out of breath, their lungs creaking. A town still rich with bicycles. In the mornings they flow softly past. In the streets there's the smell of bread.

Wolf Solent - pg. 425

He left the Lovelace after drinking a pint of Dorchester ale. The night was cool and fragrant. The sky was covered now by a grey film of feathery clouds, through which neither moon nor stars were visible except as a faint diffused luminosity, which lifted the weight of darkness from the earth, but turned the world into a place of phantoms and shadows.

Wolf Solent - pg. 40

To his right, as they drove along, the ground sloped upwards -- cornfield after cornfield of young green shoots -- to the great main ridge between Dorset and Somerset, along which -- only a mile or so away, his companion told him -- lay the main highway, famous in West Country history, between Ramsgard and Blacksod, and also between - so Mr. Otter assured him -- Salisbury and Exeter.

Wolf Solent - pg. 5

In the dusty, sunlit space of that small tobacco-stained carriage, he seemed to see, floating and helpless, an image of the whole round earth! And he saw it bleeding and victimized, like a smooth-bellied, vivisected frog. He saw it hawked at out of the humming air. He saw it netted in a quivering entanglement of vibrations, heaving and shuddering under the weight of iron and stone.

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 404

From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters  had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended  and heated  by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter's. 

A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 258

The early morning breeze dropped. It became hazy. The heat rose steadily and no relieving shower came in the early afternoon. Then the haze thickened, clouds turned from white to silver to grey to black and billowed heavily across the sky: a watercolour in black and grey..

It became dark.

The Legends Of Khasak - pg. 95

Outside, the night lay inebriated with its vastness. The wind was on the palms of Khasak. Beyond the reaches of the village late wayfarers waved their fibre torches, pulses of flame and ember. Like stricken spaceships signalling distress with their incandescent antennae, they continued their desolate journey.

Men God Forgot - pg. 15

High up in the sky, the sun is wedding the earth in mad embraces. The air is heavy with complaint, like the stifled cries of a virgin you are ravishing. A hot substance penetrates, flows through life, burning its creatures, waking monsters in the bodies of defenceless children, looting everything in its infernal rage and bringing thirst, thirst to everything : lips, the soul, the eyes, the flesh. Ah, who will deliver men from this hell? clouds of blinding dust, dust that one breathes, that one swallows always and everywhere; sweat that drowns you in its tepid water, trickles down your skin and makes your lightest clothes unbearable, sticky, to the point of making you long for death. Excrement must be drying somewhere at the foot of a wall. Not to mention the flies, the horrible nation of flies, settling as conquerors on wounds, seeking nourishment in the corners of hollowed and bleeding eye-sockets, near the noses of children where the gleaming snot draws their frightful swarm; poisoning the crude nourishment destined for the poor, the poor who worry no longer, stir no longer, because they are disgusted with the world and with everything.

The Slave - pg. 4

He threw open the barn door and saw the mountains stretching into the distance. Some of the peaks, their slopes overgrown with forests, seemed close at hand, giants with green beards. Mist rising from the woods like tenuous curls made Jacob think of Samson. The ascending sun, a heavenly lamp, cast a fiery sheen over everything. Here and there, smoke drifted upward from a summit as if the mountains were burning within. A hawk, wings outstretched, glided tranquilly with a strange slowness beyond all earthly anxieties. It appeared to Jacob that the bird had been flying without interruption since creation.

India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 391

From the top of the hunting lodge in the Dilkusha, this was the view: 'A vision of palaces, minars, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long facades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs - all rising up amid a calmm still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads ... Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinopole, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this ... "

The Guide - pg. 209

But each day the crowd increased. in a week there was a permanent hum pervading the place. Children shouted and played about, women came carrying baskets filled with pots, firewood, and foodstuffs, and cooked the food for their men and children. There were small curls of smoke going up all along the river bank, on the opposite slope and on this bank also. It was studded with picnic groups, with the women's bright-colored saris shining in the sun; men too had festive dress. Bullocks unyoked from their carts jingled their bells as they ate the straw under the trees. People swarmed around little water-holes.