The long blue train stretched a good half mile. Everybody had climbed down now into the coolness of Churchill, which is to say Church Chill, the consecrated snow country beyond the frosted windows. He walked around still orange-brown-bottomed pools ringed by rock and flowers and tiny trees. Visited by the striped tapering thorax and ochery-brown head of a mosquito, he let it bite. In the cracks of a lichen-spotted turtle-backed boulder grew moss and then eight-lobed blossoms of a Naples-yellow hue, and hollowed centers, uttering spiders of yellow-orange. He saw fresh bearprints in the sand near the water. He entered the smell of salt, blue mussels, crisp reddish-black seaweed. He did not yet understand the way the plants lived in their variously bordering neighborhoods, sometimes mixing, sometimes bowing in the wind.
