P.75 They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an
enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like
trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was
sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy
overhead.
⠀ The process of crystallisation was more advanced. The fences along
the road were so heavily encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade,
a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The
few houses between the trees glistened like wedding-cakes, their white
roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque domes. On
a lawn of green glass spurs a child’s tricycle glittered like a Faberegé
gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.
P.76 The brittle echoes of Radek’s voice, like a faint cry in a
underground grotto, reached Sanders, but he stumbled on along the road,
following the intricate patterns that revolved and expanded over his head
like jewelled mandalas.
P.166 He looked down at the bed, in whose frosted depths, like swimmers
asleep in the bottom of an enchanted pool, Serena and the mine-owner lay
together. Thorensen’s eyes were closed, and the delicate petals of a
blood-red rose blossomed from the hole in his breast like an exquisite
marine plant. Beside him Serena slept quietly, the unseen motion of her
heart sheathing her body in a faint amber glow, the palest residue of
life. Although Thorensen had died trying to save her, she lived on in her
own half-death.
⠀Something glittered in the dusk behind Sanders. He turned to see a
brilliant chimera, a man with incandescent arms and chest, race past among
the trees, a cascade of particles diffusing in the air behind him. He
flicked back behind the cross, but the man had vanished, whirling himself
away among the crystal vaults. As his luminous wake faded Sanders heard
his voice echoing across the frosted air, the plaintive words jewelled and
ornamented like everything else in that transmogrified world.
P.169 As the example of that brave apostate priest who gave the cross to
me illustrates, there is an immense reward to be found in that frozen
forest. There the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs
before our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the
surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities.
However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become
apostles of the prismatic sun.
… I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world,
where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled
crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the
crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the
trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown…
Interview (J.G Ballard talks to Vanora Bennet)
I just have a feeling in my bones: there’s something odd going on,
and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious
logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It’s
as if there are all these strange lights, and I’m looking for the wiring
and the fuse box.