But the Twilight Scaffolding they saw clearly enough to make a map of
it. For Daddy afterwards drew it from their description, and gave it
an entire page in the Wumble Book, Monkey ladling on the colour with
her camel's-hair brush as well as she could remember.
It was a page to take the breath away, the big conception blundering
clumsily behind the crude reconstruction. Great winds formed the base,
winds of brown and blue and purple, piled mountainously upon each
other in motionless coils, and so soft that the upright columns of the
structure plunged easily and deeply into them. Thus the framework
could bend and curve and sway, moving with steady glide across the
landscape, yet never collapsing nor losing its exquisite proportions.
The forests shored it up, its stays and bastions were the Jura
precipices; it rested on the shoulders of the hills. From vineyard,
field, and lake vast droves of thick grey shadows trooped in to
curtain the lower halls of the colossal edifice, as chamber after
chamber disappeared from view and Night clothed the structure from the
ground-floors upwards. And far overhead a million tiny scarves, half
sunset and half dusk, wove into little ropes that lashed the topmost
spars together, dovetailing them neatly, and fastening them at last
with whole clusters of bright thin stars.
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