philip pullman

(pintura de george sand, "une rivière dans une vallée, des moutons sur les hauteurs et des bergers", s/d)


"Then she told them all about the great battle between the Oxford townies and the clay-burners.

First she described the Claybeds, making sure she got in everything she could remember, the wide ochre-coloured washing pits, the dragline, the kilns like great brick beehives. She told them about the willow trees along the river's edge, with their leaves all silvery underneath; and she told how when the sun shone for more than a couple of days, the clay began to split up into great handsome plates, with deep cracks between, and how it felt to squish your fingers into the cracks and slowly lever up a dried plate of mud, trying to keep it as big as you could without breaking it. Underneath it was still wet, ideal for throwing at people.

And she described the smells around the place: the smoke from the kilns, the rotten-leaf-mould smell of the river when the wind was in the south-west, the warm smell of the baking potatoes the clay-burners used to eat; and the sound of the water slipping slickly over the sluices and into the washing-pits; and the slow thick suck as you tried to pull your foot out of the ground; and the heavy wet slap of the gate-paddles in the clay-thick water." (1)

philip pullman



(1) PULLMAN, Philip - The Amber Spyglass. London: Scholastic Press, 2001. ISBN 0-439-99414-4. pg. 330.