Angela Carter Quote

Twined in this fortuitous embrace, Jewel and Marianne lay among the curling ferns. At first, outlines but no colours appeared in the forest and all was blank forms of uniform and phantom grey but, after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness and, as the sky grew light, she saw nothing that was not green or else covered with flowers. Plants she could not name thrust luscious spires towards her hands; great chestnuts fantastically turreted with greenish bloom arched over her head; the curbed white blossom of hawthorn closed every surrounding perspective and a running tangle of little roses went in and out, this way and that way, through the leafy undergrowth. These roses opened as flat as plates and from them drifted the faintest and most tremulous of scents, like that of apples. Though this scent was so fragile, still it seemed the real breath of a wholly new and vegetable world, a world as unknown and mysterious to Marianne as the depths of the sea; or the body of the young man who slept, it would seem, sweetly, in her lap.