[a long, ascending, sliding sound, a poised charged ascent]
[a high note is reached, and then pensive, melodic keyboard notes begin]
[a sound that might be someone whistling — faint, momentary, tuneless}
[a voice starts to speak]
It is April, but it feels like summer.
They turn left onto the seafront, in bright sunlight.
The low, slanted cliff is alongside —
at vanishing point to the north
what is maybe a Victorian hotel or school
is expansive in the sunlight
rising above a world of trees, and smaller buildings.
On their right is the sea,
and the rapidly shelving beach.
They are walking towards the small rocky headland
where the Felixstowe seafront comes to an end,
marked on the map as Cobbold Point.
The ocean horizon is broken by the huge rectangle
of a container ship.
[the keyboard notes are plangent, reverberant]
They had arrived by train the day before.
In the evening they had walked in the opposite direction,
to the grassy spaces and rotting Second World War concrete
at the start of Landguard Point.
A place of rabbits,
and of the spiny tenacity of coastal plants.
They feel a half-aware affinity with the plants
living on a shingle promontory with a tiny layer of soil —
sea kale, yellow sea poppies, blackberries —
an affinity with beings who are living on almost nothing.
Container ships are slipping silently toward Felixstowe Docks.
Landguard Fort is here,
half-hidden amongst ruins,
and railway tracks lead to the very end of the point,
where for fifty yards the railway line continues
on a derelict wooden pier leading out into the sea —
a railway' to nowhere.
It was from here, in the nineteenth century
that prototype floating mines, detonatable from a distance,
were launched into the ocean.
They are struck by the immense sky,
all the way everywhere to the horizon,
so different from the cramped, blocked skies of London.
Around the corner from Landguard is the container terminal,
an unvisited vastness.
HG Wells alien tripods visible across the fields,
a nerve ganglion of capitalism.
The next day they will go there,
and see the cranes towering above
a scurf zone of small fields and trees,
the stacks of containers the size of ten story buildings —
their names a kind of accidental window
into the results of an entirely successful seizure of power:
Maersk-Sealand
Yang Min
Han Jin
Cosco
P&O
K-Line
Triton
Capital
Hamburg Sud.
As they walk now along the seafront
the container ship becomes perceptible
as a part of what is beyond the horizon.
They are aware that what is out there
has got away with something.
What is out there is capitalism,
the latest form of capitulation,
whatever you call it.
The whole thing feels ordinary,
and grossly engorged with some kind of obscure libido.
The feeling of it being ordinary peels away
in glimpsing even a tiny part
of the gigantic, behind-the-scenes infrastructure.
It peels away even more when the everyday glamour —
the world of tower blocks, department stores, software devices —
is destroyed by an awareness of its sweatshops,
and its reality-blocking addictions.
They had been watching the BBC adaptations
of MR James ghost stories with the soundtrack off
and with Brian Eno's album On Land playing instead.
The abstract spaces of sky and land,
with a single figure in the middle distance,
an incursion from the unknown —
the music evoking Suffolk spaces of calm, solar detachment,
a detachment on the edge of delirium.
[keyboards fade into ambient waves of electronic sound]
This whole coast is about fending off incursions from the outside.
Landguard Fort is from the mid-nineteenth century,
alongside it are concrete emplacements from the Second World War,
and all along the coast are Napoleonic Martello towers,
and World War Two bunkers and pillboxes —
machine gun nests....
And alongside them as they walk are the concrete groynes,
one after another,
there not just to hold the beaches in place,
but to prevent the land from being swept away by the sea.
And the ocean here is a powerful threat —
it is on this stretch of coast that an entire city was lost to the sea,
Dunwich, a huge seaport with four monasteries,
swept away in the Middle Ages over the space of only a few decades.
[a different voice, an interview, fading in]:
"…reached Egypt…
…and sometimes days would go past when nobody would speak to anyone else,
you know just total silence,
it was like – it was like being on a great big industrial monastic retreat.
You can’t see any land
and the horizon doesn’t get any closer to you
and if you’re not seeing many other ships
you are in a wilderness.
…superstructure…
whereas when you get to the very front of the ship, you get to the stern,
it's silent,
all you can hear is just the very, very quiet breaking of waves.
I remember noticing a certain sort of odd optical effect,
like when the horizon doesn’t get any closer,
but you can sort of see what’s near you sort of shimmering,
the sea starts to look a little bit like a wall …
like a strange sort of … liquid wall,
it’s like being in a really, really big petrie dish.
So you stop, well you don’t stop,
but you can flip your brain into perceiving the sea not as …
a horizontal expanse of water
but as like a vertical expanse of water that then meets the sky.
But then when you see hundreds of these ships
laden with these containers filled with electrical goods
it really gives you a sense of this almost like alternative world within a world
that’s operating — operating around us, which is almost like …
which is near invisible, it’s almost nearly invisible.
… down through the Suez Canal, and into the Red Sea, and then through the Gulf of Aden…"
The imposing brick building, with its turrets and chimneys,
is now above them to the left:
it will turn out to have been a luxury hotel,
built in 1900, and then closed in the fifties —
it has now been converted into flats.
[a scuttering of electronic notes, impersonal and faintly ominous]
they walk around Cobbold point,
whose limpet-covered boulders have been augmented
by a wind-tunnel curved, sloping sea-buttress to protect the sand —
it is made of interlocked giant blocks of some ultra-hard material,
looking as if it was designed to survive constant tank bombardment.
They find now they are in open coastal country,
looking toward two of the drum-shaped Martello towers, a half mile apart,
and toward Bawdsey Manor,
a nineteenth-century mansion surrounded by a large stand of mature trees,
a half mile further, beyond the estuary of the river Deben.
Alongside them is a golf course,
and beyond on either side of the river there are wide areas of marshland.
When they arrive at the Deben the ferry is on the opposite bank of the river.
It comes toward them, a small open boat thirty feet long —
it crosses the river continuously through the day,
but only between late spring and September.
They buy their tickets, and cross the river’s mouth
with two or three other people,
wide reed beds around tine river on tile left —
to the right sand banks, and open ocean.
[the music is shot through with fast-vibration electronic surges
as if alien or unknown machines are emitting sudden, very charged pulses]
Bawdsey Manor was the place where
dozens of women radar decryption operatives
were billeted during the Second World War,
a place of relative social freedom.
Women who are likely to have partied into the night
on the lawns of the manor,
dancing to Glenn Miller and Al Bowley,
walking under wartime stars on the beach alongside it,
women who helped to combat the use of ‘window’,
the gaps in radar defences created by
the dropping of clouds of metal particles,
creating zero-detection or total-detection gaps in radar defences
through which attacking planes could pass.
[a second interview]:
"We’ve got photographic evidence, she became a sergeant,
she was clearly training other women, and men —
we suspect that she trained my father because we have photographs
where she’s a sergeant and he’s a corporal.
My parents were clearly involved in something
that made an enormous impression on them,
and particularly on my mother,
but she was never ever able to talk about.
And again, another thing that happened was
she was admitted to Ipswich hospital,
and she was getting a bit confused, in her 90s —
I should think her 90s, her late 80s —
and I went in one day and the sister on the ward asked me,
“What did your mother do?
She was something important in her life wasn’t she?”
And I said [laughing], “Oh no she wasn’t…”
My mum left school at thirteen, I mean she had no —
she went to a village school — she had no qualifications.
I got my father’s service record, and, from the RAF,
but they couldn’t get my mother’s, they had apparently been destroyed.
But it’s when you put different things together
about places she talked about, about Swanwich and Pevensey,
and these were all key radar places.
And as a woman I’m really interested because I know that
my sister and I, we were brought up fairly differently to most of our friends.
There was definitely no wedding talk —
we were going to do something … with our lives.
When they recruited the WAFs they would say —
they were actually recruited on the basis
they’d be asked if they’d like to do something secret,
if they wanted to do something that they couldn’t be told about.
Things that stick with me are the odd things that she did tell us,
but also her general attitude —
she couldn’t bear men who talked about their war experiences.
We knew there was something very special happened to my mother,
but she was never ever able to talk about it, to tell us."
They skirt around the grounds of the manor, by the river,
and then they are walking north on the beach,
with low, crumbly looking cliffs alongside,
topped by trees from the Bawdsey Manor gardens.
The long shingle beach is empty of people.
There is mile after mile of wooden groynes,
intensely eroded, sculpted by sea and air,
the groynes that appear in 'Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you My Lad',
a story inspired by MR James's visits to precisely this area,
between Felixstowe and Bawdsey.
It is in this story that dreams and other dream-like states
are glimpsed as worlds of exteriority,
as places where external forces can be encountered,
beings from elsewhere.
For a moment the eerie nature of sleep as a whole is grasped —
there is an eight-hour gap in our memory every twenty-four hours.
Every night we venture compulsively out through the dark doorway in the wall.
[whistle sounds begin to appear, becoming a cacophony, then subsiding]
In 1968, when Jonathan Miller directs the TV adaptation
the viewers see the beach with the groynes,
and they see the holidaying scholar fleeing in terror, in a dream,
from an entity from the elsewhere
summoned by the blowing of an ancient whistle he has unearthed.
The beach is the outside, it is a locus of encounters,
not an instance of a familiar interiority.
In 1904 when the story was published
MR James wrote from a space which was the disowned counterpart
of the emergent literary modernism,
and from fundamentally outside
the world of psychological modernism of The Interpretation of Dreams,
published 5 years before.
[sampled repeat of the phrase from earlier, with slight, muffling echo]:
Every night we venture compulsively out through the dark doorway in the wall.
[a voice is humming, wavering; a quality of someone who is out of breath]
[another voice: not the voice of the narrator]:
“A long stretch of shore.
Shingle edged by sand.
Black groynes running down to the water.
The light obscure,
late winter evening,
slight cold rain.
On this bleak stage no actor is visible at first —
when, in the distance a bobbing black object appears.
A man running, jumping, clambering over the groynes,
and every few seconds looking eagerly back.
Each obstacle seems to cause more difficulty than the last.
Will he get over this next one?
It seems a little higher than the others.
Yes, half climbing, half throwing himself,
he does get over, and falls in a heap on the other side.
There, as if really unable to get up again,
he remains crouching under the groyne,
looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety.
So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner has been shown,
but now can be seen, far up the shore,
a little flicker of something light-coloured,
moving with great swiftness and irregularity.
It seemed to be coming from all around,
a low wordless murmur, almost like a murmur of distant voices,
with now and then a trilling, that might have been little spurts of laughter.
But who would be laughing here under the sea?
He is forcing his way through viscous dark green water
looking for the musical box whose sweet tinkling voice
is sometimes behind, sometimes just ahead.
If only he could move faster, trailing useless legs through the green,
he might catch up with it.
Suddenly it ceased, the water grew thicker and darker,
he saw bubbles rising from his mouth, began to choke,
and thought — this is what it feels like to drown.”
[dark, churning electronic notes]
[a surge of nine or ten whistling sounds]
[two sustained piano notes, an upward melody]
[the narrator’s voice returns]
They find a way onto the top of the low cliffs,
cliffs made of an eroding, light-coloured rock,
covered in cactus-like plants with pink flowers, and succulent leaves —
and with scrubby trees growing on their tops.
They continue in the same direction,
the beach below them is still deserted —
only now maybe there are two people visible
a mile or so in the distance, to the north.
Coming out into the open,
to their left is the place where Bawdsey's radar equipment was deployed,
the highest point on the cliffs.
Further on, but largely hidden behind wire and a grass bank,
there is a decommissioned cold war base.
After a while ploughed fields appear on this side,
sloping down from the edge of the cliffs, given a minimum of shelter.
The cliff-edge is a zone of bent-back sea-blasted vegetation,
they pass a hawthorn tree scrawned out sideways by the wind.
[the whistling, like insects, less ominous now]
They arrive at a large pillbox perched precariously on the cliff’s edge.
Before long the cliff here will collapse,
and the Second World War concrete will fall to the beach.
It is like the cliff-edge grave in which the scholar finds the whistle
in the TV version of 'Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You'.
Inside, the pillbox is a long chamber of concrete
with rectangles of light facing out to the sea horizon,
a lingering concrete memory of anglo-germanic war,
the chronically insane sibling staring out
toward the even more insane brother beyond the North Sea.
[the music darkens again into blaring, industrial sounds]
They traverse a wooded slope with concrete ruins everywhere.
The radar base is a low concrete building —
a hundred and fifty yards down from the cliffs,
its roof below the level of the hill.
Radar is a becoming active in relation to the unknown.
Send a few clicks into the unknown —
see what comes back.
They are now walking with the sun in their faces,
they, the woods and the reedbeds are all suffused by a summer warmth
that has broken through in spring.
A solar lucidity of sky and river —
Bawdsey Manor is in the woods behind them,
in front, the low hexagonal form of another pillbox fortification,
half-filled with silt from the river.
A week before they had watched Picnic at Hanging Rock.
A film that dares to be about disappearance —
and, ultimate scandal in the male-dominated world —
the disappearance of extraordinary women.
A film that, with Joan Lindsay's novel,
from which it is very closely drawn,
is a full escape toward the libidinally charged,
planetary thresholds of the unknown.
Here there is neither a refusal of the anomalous outside of human reality —
the refusal intrinsic to the dominant, blocked form of modernism —
and nor, as with MR James's demons,
is there an outside which is populated by elements
from obscure regions of the religious dimension
that modernism primarily leaves behind.
In 1968 Lindsay projects her wrenchingly enigmatic summer events
back to the start of the twentieth century,
just as LP Hartley had done a few years before,
with the Norfolk summer of The Go-Between.
However, Lindsay has broken free from the dogmatic dreams and nightmares of religion,
whereas Hartley’s eerie summer is to a small extent
still trapped in the grim orbit of the MR James stories.
Events in The Go-Between partly turn around
the boy protagonist's improvised, occult-language curses —
and curses are fundamental in MR James as with ‘The Casting of the Runes’
and in particular with ‘A Warning to the Curious’,
where three long-buried East-Anglian royal crowns have been protected by a curse
that fatally brings a demon to anyone who digs up one of the crowns.
[a woman’s voice sings high notes
that give the impression they are floating in an unknown sky]
[she sings a two-note refrain, the first note sliding upward into the second]
[a calm intense hum is heard throughout the woman’s song]
[the voice has a charged, intense serenity]
[it sounds like an affirmation or celebration that is also somehow a warning]
Now they set off along a series of tiny lanes, going northwest.
They pass a pillbox by the road, and then another,
the second one guarding the place where a side road comes up from the sea.
It is on the opposite side of the road,
barely visible amongst undergrowth that has grown up around it.
The halcyon calm of these war ruins leads them to the idea
of a derelict Felixstowe container port, in summer —
buckling, partly collapsed mountains of containers,
covered in vines and small plants, buddleia flowering on the summits,
a fox trotting past through thickets of willow herb and blackberry,
thistledown drifting through the canyons.
The villages they walk through are basking in sunlight.
There is very little traffic on the road.
In one village, they walk through the sound of drums
being played loudly by a young boy in the garden of his house —
it is like a scene from The Swimmer, the Burt Lancaster film
that shows sunlit acute dislocation hidden behind a loss of memory.
A little later they pass a forecourt with a collection of vintage cars.
They come to another village, arriving at a crossroads with a pub, and a single shop.
They buy food, then walk into a new terrain of fields and hedges, no one in sight.
[new melodic phrases appear in the woman’s song]
[the two notes are sung again, transposed higher]
The eerie is an incursion of the unknown into a silence, an emptiness, a gap.
The emptiness can be an expanse of wilderness in midday sunlight,
or it can be a derelict, city industrial estate at night.
The unknown can be the unknowable,
whether the horrific or the numinous aspect of the unknowable,
or it can be that whose intent and nature can come to be known,
even if it is a new kind of entity or a new dimension of reality —
the unknown which is knowable.
It could be hostile, or friendly,
and it could be hostile with intent to stalk and attack, for whatever reason,
or friendly with intent to observe and then make contact.
Or it could be totally uninterested.
Eventually the road becomes a track,
they go up a slope with fields on either side.
In the distance they had seen what for a second looked like snow —
it turns out to be a very large cultivated field covered in sun-reflecting plastic,
the plants underneath being given greenhouse heat
with the help of the petrochemical industry.
They walk across low hills covered in heather and bracken,
and occasional silver birch and oak trees, coastal heathland.
There are areas of woodland on the higher reaches of the rising ground.
They cross a spur of heathland —
amongst the bracken there are patches of a spectral heather —
a type of heather with grey-white leaves.
[a gentle electronic landscape, with occasional buzzing]
The footpath is called Sandlings Walk —
it crosses the terrain on a southeast-northwest diagonal,
heading in the direction of Sutton Hoo.
Sutton Hoo — place of long-bidden relics and — strikingly —
when MR James was dreaming up the unearthing of ancient artefacts,
he was walking around on a stretch of Suffolk coast
where the Sutton Hoo ship burial was still hidden beneath the ground,
and where it would stay undiscovered until thirty five years later.
They reach an open space of fields and scrubby grassland.
Near to them is what will turn out to be a small sewage treatment works.
In the distance they see a large number of motor caravans.
It is maybe a Roma encampment, or maybe an encampment of travellers,
they never find out if is the old travellers or the new ones
who own the fifty or so caravans scattered over a half mile area,
sheltered from the prevailing wind by woodlands.
They walk past the caravans on the footpath.
Silence. Not even the dogs bark.
A skill of the nomads is to be imperceptible.
[the music has shifted toward deeper surges of sound
threaded with clicks, interspersed with pensive, resonant notes]
Beyond this encampment there are woodlands.
Using their map, and a single small sign by the path, they take a right turn,
and walk three hundred yards through the trees.
They emerge into a wide, ragged glade, opening onto fields to the east.
In this open area there is an ancient ring-shaped mound,
covered in grass, maybe two hundred feet across.
There are no signs there of any kind, marking it,
or saying what it is, only a circle on the map,
and an indication of a ring tumulus — an ancient earthwork.
A robin is singing from a silver birch tree growing alongside the mound.
[a long wave of muffled, quivering electronic sound]
They return to the main path, to Sandlings Walk.
They are now walking in the midst of places that inspired On Land,
Eno's hauntedly sunlit 1982 album.
Several miles to the northeast, a little behind them, is Lantern Marsh.
A few miles ahead, alongside and above Woodbridge,
where Eno grew up, is Leeks Hill wood.
Both of these names generate On Land track titles,
and the third name from this area is Dunwich Beach —
the beach that faces out to where the city used to be.
Other titles are Lizard Point,
Unfamiliar Wind,
The Shadow,
The Lost Day....
Sometime around 1977, Eno was becalmed.
As if a wind ceased blowing, or as if a new, unfamiliar wind blew,
one for which he was unwilling to put up sails.
The title The Lost Day carries a suggestion of an episode of amnesia.
Fugues, losses of memory, are fundamentally eerie.
But with the eeriness of amnesia the unknown thing from the outside is you.
[high atmosphere sounds shift to faintly distorted form]
What happened?
What happened on some lost day in the late seventies?
On the Suffolk coast, there is a persistent feeling that the land is all out at sea.
Eno's title Lizard Point picks out a peninsula,
a place surrounded by ocean, and the most southerly place in Britain.
There is a feeling of a hot summer day,
where something becomes perceptible behind the surface of the land,
behind the surface of the day.
To transform another of Eno's titles from this time,
the land becomes hollow, it becomes hypersubstantial,
it becomes an eerie emptiness consisting of awareness, feeling, intent.
The sea is not around the land, it is the land,
and it is the sky, a sky now swept with truly unfamiliar winds.
[shimmering and surging, a charged inchoate hum]
There is a figure on the edge of an escarpment,
maybe it is Eno, it doesn't matter,
and maybe it is Rendlesham Forest around them, behind them,
and Lantern Marsh off in the distance, again it doesn’t matter —
they will live this, but they will not remember,
or only their dreams will remember.
There is a white void of air beneath their feet.
This white void is the planet,
it is beneath the figure on the hill, and all around them,
they are a dream within a dream, the planet is a dream within a dream.
The planet is teeming with inorganic sentience, as is the cosmos —
potential allies, parasitic entities, explorers of the unknown,
shadows, MR James demons.
The figure on the hill — a man, a woman? —
they see this, grasp it all, but it is too intense to be remembered,
too perturbing for any normal level of energy.
And then it is gone.
The fugue memories keep coming through for a while, like aftershocks,
ruptural incursions which do not rupture nearly enough.
[sounds twist to a faint distorted hum]
[a few piano notes, spaced apart, melodic, resonant]
They arrive at Sutton Hoo.
Mounds in the grass, in late evening light,
and a view southwest across the river Deben to Woodbridge.
The place of many ship burials, just one of which survived un-robbed.
A place where the world beyond the artefacts is almost entirely unknown.
The quality of the jewellery work of the objects has a timeless brilliance,
the fluidly intricate lines suggest many traditions,
and are far beyond most of them in their quality —
they are worlds of powerfully stylized eagles, gods in lotus positions, deer, wild boar:
and these lines meld into curved abstract designs.
The objects overall come eclectically from many places, from Scandinavia to Turkey.
but almost nothing is known of these people —
we don't know their traditions, we don't know whose grave it was,
we don't even know if there was a body in the grave.
[a third interview]:
There’s some things called the shoulder clasps, which —
gold and garnet … sort of jewellery, which appears
to have been clipped in some way over the shoulders of a garment.
They’re completely unique.
But they’re beautifully manufactured, and the way they actually work
is very unusual, and very creative, so the jeweller
was both a very skilled jeweller, an artist in terms of the design,
but also understood mechanism and engineering.
The jewellery work would be extremely challenging to a modern jewellery maker.
You know they didn’t even have lenses in the seventh century.
It’s interesting thinking about atmosphere of these places,
in that these graves were not robbed
until a thousand years – or slightly less – after these burials,
and yet people must have known for hundreds of years
that they were full of gold.
There are still some, you know, really major mysteries about it,
or just unknowns."
From the rings at Avebury to Sutton Hoo
there is always a semiotic silence confronting you,
from the chalk White Horse at Uffington
to the Sandlings Walk circular mound,
a silence punctured by deeply evocative gestures.
It is important to be neither romantic nor condescending.
Maybe there were atrocities at Sutton Hoo,
as with the recorded account of the viking ship funeral
three hundred years later in Russia, where a young girl is drugged,
gang-raped by the relatives of the dead man and then sacrificed.
And maybe at the Sandlings Walk circular mound
there was a community of people who knew far more about the world
than we do now, far more maybe about love and lucidity and wider realities,
and maybe far more about the causes of the horror and violence of the human world.
People who perhaps knew that we are all living
in the ruined bases and fortifications of a war
in which the human species overall was defeated,
with the general loss of memory of the defeat
being an imposed result of the event —
a war which would explain why human beings are crippled slaves,
prone to monstrous outbursts of violence.
Why is it that the ability to travel in intensity
is so rarely accessed by human beings?
[the music become a gentle, immense hum]
Day is coming to an end.
A few lights are now visible in houses across the estuary, on the edge of Woodbridge.
They are looking south, across the river,
to trees and fields dreaming on the horizon.
In a field below Sutton Hoo there are horses grazing, their tails swishing gently.
The warmth of the day is still there —
a glow of summer heat, a remembered precursor.
And summer heat is a doorway to the outside
that is blocked by MR James, writer of 1900,
invoking the anomalous spaces beyond psychoanalytic modernism,
but in the name of a very male, and very religious tradition.
It is not surprising that in the struggle for an unfettered modernism
LP Hartley sets The Go-Between in East Anglia in a long blazing summer in 1900,
where the thirteen-year-oId Leo, improvising explorer of the anomalous,
and in love with Marian, thinks toward the end,
‘maybe Marian was the heat?’
Nor is it surprising that, a few years later,
Joan Lindsay, in Picnic at Hanging Rock
sets her novel in the same summer — 1900 —
and, taking The Go-Between’s new girls’ school in a big country house to Australia,
she shows three women crossing a threshold of existence in midday heat
and disappearing permanently into the unknown.
Marian, at the end of The Go-Between, is blocked and trapped,
but in Picnic at Hanging Rock Miranda, Marion and Greta all escape.
[huge surging bass notes]
[the woman’s voice sings a high, downward-falling refrain
sounding weightless, poised, rather than melancholy]
Radar.
Send a few clicks into the unknown.
See what comes back.
[the woman’s voice, singing a three note refrain that ends upward]
[long surges of deep-bass sound – big slow waves of bass]
[crackling sounds like electrical systems short-circuiting]
See what comes back.
[slightly distorted, echoing]
[more ambient spaces of bass, and scuttering sounds,
a sublime expanse of derelict cosmos
with the occasional sparking of wrecked machinery]
[a very high electronic note, sustained for several seconds]
See what comes back.
[more distorted by echo]
[the woman’s voice is heard again, singing high, calm notes]
[a last glimpse of a serene, slightly unsettling sky]