Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He stood there in his slippers, teetering and awestruck on the dirty butter-coloured rim of what had been his living room, his dying room, and forced his gaze down from the eyestrain heights back to the great, boarded expanses that surrounded him. These were not, as he’d first thought, featureless. He saw now that the tiered frame he perched wobbling on the edge of was in fact just one of many near-identical wood rectangles enclosing sunken indentations like the one he occupied. These were arranged in an extensive grid with broad blonde boardwalks running back and forth between them, like a kind of mile-wide gingham. It resembled rows of windows that were set into the floor for some unfathomable reason, rather than the walls. Because this regular and neatly-ordered pattern covered all of the terrain between him and the far, invisible horizon, the most distant trapdoor recesses were shrunken to a screen of close-packed dots, like when he’d held his eyes close to the printed pictures in the comics from America his sister saved.

He thought he’d probably be stricken with a headache if he stared for too long at the vanishing extremities of the preposterously big arcade that he was in. “Arcade”, Michael decided, was a term that better conjured up the atmosphere of this immense, glass-covered hall than “railway station”, which had been his first impression. Actually, the more that he considered it, the more he came to see that this place was exactly like the old Emporium Arcade that ran up from Northampton’s market square, but realised on a glorious, titanic scale. If he looked right or left, across the sweeping breadth of the huge corridor, he saw the bounding walls were a confusion of brick buildings stacked atop each other and connected by precarious flights of stairs with banisters and balconies. Amongst these he could see what looked like decorated if dilapidated shop-fronts, such as those which ran up either side of the emporium’s perpetual twilight slope. The deep-stained hardwood balustrade that edged the balconies appeared to be the twin of that which ran around the upper floor of the terrestrial arcade, but he was much too far away, even from this huge hallway’s nearest walls, to tell if that was genuinely the case.

It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children’s annuals and the sour metal lick of cast-off Dinky cars.

Training his eyes upon some of the nearer dots, and bearing in mind that even the further ones were apertures some hundred square feet in dimension, Michael saw that here and there massively enlarged trees were growing up through one or two of the more distant rectangular openings. He counted three of these, with possibly a fourth much further off along the endless bore of the arcade, so distant that it might have been another tree but could as easily have been a pillar formed by rising smoke. A couple of the leafy outgrowths, boughs and branches greatly magnified, reached almost to the glass roof, dizzyingly far above. He could see ash-fleck pigeons swirling up and down the huge and jutting trunks from perch to perch, with their size having not apparently been increased in the same way as that of the foliage, so that they now looked less like fowl and more like pearl-grey ladybirds. So small were they, compared with the immense arboreal structure they were roosting in, that some sat sheltered comfortably within the corrugations of its bark. Their ruffling coos, echoed and amplified by the unusual acoustics of the glass emporium roof that curved above, were audible despite the gaping distances involved, a kind of feathered undertow of murmur he could hear beneath the general background rustle of this extraordinary space. The presence of the trees combined with the sheer scale of everything around him meant that Michael couldn’t tell if he felt like he was inside or out of doors.

Since he already stood with his eyes lifted to the topmost tablecloth-sized leaves of the immeasurable giants, Michael thought that he might risk another cautious squint at the unlikely firmament that lay beyond the curling ironwork and Coca-Cola bottle panes that formed the covering of the great arcade.

It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected but, once looked at, it was very difficult to look away. Its colour, or at least its colour over that giant stretch of passage where he found himself, was a more deep and priceless azure than he could have previously imagined. Further off along the mighty hall and at the limits of what he could see from where he stood, the regal blue appeared to have ignited, to have melted down to furnace reds and golds. Michael glanced back across his shoulder, looking down the stunning corridor the other way, and saw that at its most remote extremes the boundless sky, which could be seen through the glass panels of the arcade’s ceiling, was on fire. As with the blue above, the hotter hues he could see flaring in the distance seemed almost fluorescent in their brilliance, like the unreal shades you sometimes got in films. However, though the sizzling colours of the heavens were most certainly arresting, it was the unearthly bodies drifting through that vista that had seized Michael’s attention. It was these that made the sight almost impossible to tear his gaze away from.

They weren’t clouds, although they were as variously sized and just as graceful and unhurried in their motion. They were more, he thought, like blueprint drawings that someone had done of clouds. For one thing you could only see their pallid silver graphite lines and not their contours. For another, all those lines were straight. It was as if some very clever student of geometry had been assigned the task of modelling every crease and convolution of the drifting cumuli, so that each cloud’s shape was constructed from a million tiny facets. The effect was more like haphazardly crumpled balls of paper, albeit paper he could see through to discern the lines and angles of their every inner complication. This meant also that the blazing background colours of the sky were visible between the intricate and ghostly limning of the floating diagrams.

Beside their gradual drift across the mile-wide ribbon of celestial blue that he could see through the emporium’s roof, he noticed that the forms were also moving and contorting slowly in themselves as they progressed across the sky, the way that real clouds did. Instead of languid and unfurling tongues of vapour, though, the movement here was that, again, of badly crinkled vellum as it gradually unfolded from its scrunch in the recesses of a wicker paper-basket. Faceted extrusions crept and crackled as the towering heaps of blueprint-weather lazily unpacked themselves, and there was something in the way that the interior lines and angles moved which he found fascinating, though he struggled to define exactly what it was.

It was a bit like if you had a cube of paper but were looking at it from end on, so that you couldn’t see it was a cube with sides, and all you saw was a flat square. Then, if you turned the cube or changed your viewpoint slightly, all its true depth would swing into view and you would understand that you were looking at a solid shape, not just a cut-out.

This was like that, only taken a stage further. In the shifting of the geometric tangles he surveyed, it was as if he gazed directly at something he took to be a cube, but then it was rotated or his vantage somehow altered, so that it turned out to be a much more complicated form, as different from a cube as cubes were from flat squares of paper. It was a lot cubier, for a start, with its lines running in at least one more direction than there really were. He stood there balanced on the framing edge of the square vat behind him, head tipped back so he could goggle at the spectacle above, and tried to think it through.