J. McClain’s Reviews > Against the Day > Status Update

"Iceland spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself as 'real,' provides that all-important ninety-degree twist to their light, so that they can exist alongside of our world and not be seen.

There was a "Ray-rush in progress--light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extra-Hertzian rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of them professional claim-jumpers aiming to get on by brute force, a very few genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else's single-minded flight from reason....

...a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, " Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light, So is altitude transformed, continuously into light." Words to that effect, well, maybe not words exactly...."

It was a small AEtherist community, maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church.

"But you boys--you're not storybook characters." He had a thought. "Are you?" "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly," Randolph supposed. "Although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction." "I guess I read the sports pages mostly."

"Temptation, much to Lindsay's chagrin, lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins.

At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him.

"Now single up all lines!"