There are many felicitous echoes and counterpoints along the way. Silent fog on still deep water at the outset; a boat outlined against dark grey and against clouded grey; an explosion of gulls in sea mist and spray. Echoes and chains follow from this: reddened waves under a white sky are transformed into a photograph of the white Mer de Glace with a climber in red, echoing across to memories of Ravilious as painter of the northern waters whose fascination with ice and the shores of the north began with the eighteenth-century painter Francis Towne's renderings of the Mer de Glace in the Alps. Writing this I remember a chance meeting with Ravilious's daughter at the house of friends in London. A handsome and kindly woman in her sixties, with her father's eyes. All the years I have been writing about Ravilious I have occasionally dreamed about him: that he will come into the cold hall of a house that does not exist, a house smelling of coal fires; that he will begin to talk at once, shaking the Arctic Ocean off his dark hair as if it were only rainwater after all, as if he had been caught in the storm on a headland, benighted, laughing, painting out of doors.

The distant forest hummed, the air was full of divinities that extended their transparent lips toward the snails of our ears, whispering their hoarse and guttural commands in an unknown language. They were everywhere, they implored, moaned, and shouted, they spoke to us intensely, intensely like being punched, but we didn’t have the matching sensory organs. We would have needed the delicate plumage of a moth’s face, the forked tongue of ophidians, the lateral line of fish, the organ with which spiders understand everything that happens in the world, that is, their glittering webs. The malign or beneficent creatures were everywhere around us, they observed us and guided our movements and meandering thoughts, they desperately tried to contact us, but our skin did not see them and our retinas did not hear.