Thanks for your thoughts! DT thought the same as you, and Russ liked them both. Thing is, you are bang on about the paragraph after, it does make a difference to the feel of the whole chapter. Here's the bit that follows:
'The night was clear, a pale full moon and stars everywhere. The craters on the moon's surface shone at me and directly below, not far from where Church Lane joins the park footpath, stood a hedge I had not seen before. It sparkled slightly with what I first thought was dew - 'So dawn will be soon,' I told myself - but dawn felt a long way away. I went to look at the hedge.
It was stiff with frost crystallised on the web of a spider, reflecting the light, intricate and symmetrical. I stepped back a little to notice that the whole hedge was a maze of jewels and sugar phantoms, iridescent webs of differing shapes and sizes, studded by the corpses of insects. Some webs were big enough to trap small birds and these did not shine, tiny bones and remnants of feather pinched between the wire and the wood.
I realised that the roots and twigs of the hedge were held together by myriads of webs, that the hedge had not grown at all but had somehow been placed there, built piece by piece by the spiders.'
Now you see, this left DT cold, and it is meant to be cold - the coldest night of the year in fact. But is it flat cold, or interesting cold?
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Date: 2005-06-15 01:07 pm (UTC)'The night was clear, a pale full moon and stars everywhere. The craters on the moon's surface shone at me and directly below, not far from where Church Lane joins the park footpath, stood a hedge I had not seen before. It sparkled slightly with what I first thought was dew - 'So dawn will be soon,' I told myself - but dawn felt a long way away. I went to look at the hedge.
It was stiff with frost crystallised on the web of a spider, reflecting the light, intricate and symmetrical. I stepped back a little to notice that the whole hedge was a maze of jewels and sugar phantoms, iridescent webs of differing shapes and sizes, studded by the corpses of insects. Some webs were big enough to trap small birds and these did not shine, tiny bones and remnants of feather pinched between the wire and the wood.
I realised that the roots and twigs of the hedge were held together by myriads of webs, that the hedge had not grown at all but had somehow been placed there, built piece by piece by the spiders.'
Now you see, this left DT cold, and it is meant to be cold - the coldest night of the year in fact. But is it flat cold, or interesting cold?