A crowd of fishermen content in their indolence; marauding maddened pachyderms, discontented by jilted Empire’s reluctant reps; whip-yielding convict executioners flexing in dusty Rawalpindi execution fields, their stretched biceps wooing dazed, lusting crowds
All commenced a mad stampede, on Thursday, through the muffled hallways of a 15th-century castle in the Loire Valley
Thundering under elaborate chandeliers, past peering portraiture of yesteryear’s regal gentry, past the encrusted blood of a woman’s handprint – vanished overnight in the 1920s – and the etched hopes of jailed Jews consigned to the peeling walls of SS-commandeered attics
What a noise, what a hullabaloo! Only the enclosing forest’s massed ranks of trees could hush the fuss, muffle the amok, preserve sanity.
And they did. Escape into the forest, its muddied, ambiguous lakes, enigmatic thickets, unbroken treeline stretching away into Time.