Page 225

By Jack Joseph Smith

senses became. Their approach was pushing against an unidentified force his body was feeling desper- ate about entering. Passing through the last East side grove of trees, and into a glen laid before the continuance of more trees running West, their tops moving like upblown drapes from an undercurr- ent of breeze, Prankster's immediate attention was directed toward a wire-framed man. His face was all raw bones and it felt to Prankster that this was a man of a kind of desolate-power drawing it out of an ob- scured rock hidden from the average-man by a nature demanding the same obscurity from the doveish soul, that the rock had from the sighs of cosmopolitan wor- ship. Not an abstract gem, but a blazen rock whose function it was to blind rather than tantalize; and the man's continence was fixed as the trees to the figure of the snake; as though he were limp through long periods wasting no energy for the time to be coiled; The man rose. (Surged) The sockets of his eyes set into the swirling cast iron platter of his face, he appeared as an invitation to the dizzy fall exper- ienced at the acceptance of doom. The place where the body is all heavyness, and the hollowed out continuing as below the

Original Scan

Page 225

AI Interpretation

GPT

The meeting condenses around a raw-boned central figure whose presence turns the glen into an image of doom, charisma, and occult authority.

The page is almost mythic in the way it sees this man. He is not described as merely threatening; he seems geological, serpentine, and set apart from ordinary social visibility, which raises the deal into something closer to a rite of exposure.

Claude

The meeting condenses around a raw-boned central figure whose presence turns the whole glen stricter. The page is the moment the deal finds its authority.