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Show 208 that steeper hills with mansions. As the moment broke, the landscape slipped from its roots and rushed toward him. For a long time he watched lawns, flower beds, pretty houses with shingled roofs pour down the hillside into the lagoon, pulling after them the trees, the quiet lanes, the distant fields and siloes, the mansions on the more remote hills. Buildings appeared on the crest of the farthest hill and sank out of view into a valley only to reappear on the next crest closer and careen once again down into a valley and appear again still closer. Towers, steeples, farmhouses, meadows with rock walls, wooded pastures rose and fell as they approached; the closer landscape was already a blur as tier upon tier of houses and markets swept down the final hillside into the water. The water accepted them with scarcely a ripple, lapping quietly at the bare shoreline when it was over, and only by paying careful attention was Lorin able to see that the surface was dimpled with small whirlpools. The sudden quiet made him open his eyes. They had been making a great deal of noise, he realized. An unfamiliar face with four eyes and two noses and a mouth overlapping another mouth was looking at him. "Well," she said. He closed his eyes again and the whirlpools had become pinwheels. He opened them and the parts to her face had fallen back together. She was smiling at him crosseyed. He tried very hard not to hear footsteps in the bedroom. There were a great many footsteps just outside, going past on the veranda, also loud voices, and he wished they would go away. He disliked lying there with his pants down, but every time he mustered the resolution to pull them up he discovered he had been asleep, having wild dreams. At such moments Gloriana put her fingertips on his eyelids and closed them, and he would start awake again from a different dream to hear a different series of noises from outside. Finally, though, it ended, when she kissed him awake, |
