Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"His ruminations were interrupted by the outlandish sound of a mechanical roaring from above. All those boys not caught up in the periphery of the fight’s repercussions had their faces already level with the cloudless sky, volcano-cone noses pointing upwards."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Thus, I was leaving home, not before time, to go to Teachers' Training College, and I was walking, rather than trusting to the train. It was not long before the ancient view of Whofage was left several crossed brows behind and, as I crested yet another untrodden sky-line, I saw the sharp icicle-like pinnacle of a pylon, poking from what was no doubt the midst of a forgotten city. Nobody had warned me that I might have to dodge around such communities, on the way to the Parismony."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Greg then heard a key go. This was someone, he assumed, who had more right to be in Susan's house than a complete stranger: her husband Mike, fresh from hospital-visiting, doffing his over-things in the hall so as to enter the chintzy parlour with a petal-based cone of forgiving flowers – or, perhaps, wanting-to-be-forgiven flowers. Only to find that Susan wasn't there. She was in the kitchen, consigning the unspeakably jagged-mouthed baked bean can back into the flip-top waste-bin – wherein Greg heard the residue of muck resettle around its restored constituent: heard it as if it was inside his head."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The blue books were piled with methodical randomness under the trite ornament. They were perfectly unread, perfectly staged, perfectly stylised props. The moment was perfect unto itself.

Perfect - until I showed them to the thingie.

The thingie was not a thing as such.

Things existed. Things could be measured, felt, seen, smelt (even to the point of gauging no smell at all), heard (even to the point of gauging no sound at all); things could be described, interpreted, evaluated. Things possessed features, extent, personality (even to the point of gauging no personality), point (even to the point of gauging no point at all). A thing was a thing. A thing of and in itself. A thing had a first cause or creator, an ongoing preserver or potential destroyer. A thing could even have self-spontaneous existence or combustion. A thing you could hang a hat on.

Thingies, in comparison, were fictional things, things-in-disguise. A thingie was a drogulus, an unthing in thing’s hat. A thingie was, by power of suspension of disbelief, a reality in the shape of story, or a story in the shape of reality. A thingie, by paradox, was also a logician’s box with make-believe inside that promises to be a thing if you open it or one with a thing inside that promises to be make-believe if you don’t open it. A magicking of imagination towards the form of true perception. A prestidigitation of an unthingable thing making eyes at you from under its hat.

“What do you think of the blue books?” I asked, upon first becoming aware of the thingie’s presence.

For obvious reasons, I knew that the thingie saw me as the thing that had created it, so I was rather pleased to find it quite independently humouring me by promising to answer me at all: “Before I answer, do you really think I am capable of having views about anything?”

“Of course. You are a friend of mine of several years’ standing, are you not? Would you like a drink, by the way?”

“Yes, please. I’ll have a scotch on the rocks. But these blue books, I can’t see what is on the cover or if they have a cover at all. Are they meant to be nothing but spine. And the cone-thing on top – is that simply to pretend they have depth as well?”

"Not exactly a cone, more a blunt pyramid, I’d say.”

The thingie was taking me into areas which I had hoped to avoid. I poured out its drink and handed it the glass with a great feeling of suspense to see whether it was able to drink it. I did not like to stare so I continued the conversation as I returned the bottle to the drinks cabinet: “There is a cover bearing the silhouette of a statue on it amid a cloudy sky.”

"I only have your word for that, haven’t I? Can I have some ice?”

I looked up with the growing realisation that I was suffering from the worst case of not-being-able-to-end-something that it was possible for any writer to suffer from. A metafiction with no possible meaningful clincher to put it to bed.

Except I was still there. And the thingie was still there. It had the glass extended for the ice! If it had all been a story, I could have ended it there with a writerly whimper and an unscripted shrug. You win some, you lose some. But I could not end it at all.

The story was real. I was real. The thingie was real. I and the thingie are still there. Count yourselves lucky because you can treat this whole thing as a proper story and simply leave with your own snigger and shrug. Leave us there with the pile of blue books, leave us tussling for the truth of things, thinking-out things, thinging-out thoughts.

We two things or thingies in hats ... in aspic ... or iced in ice.

Praying to be stoned so as to blunt the edge of our existence.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

A vast area of land in the centre of England known as Cone Zero was given over to memorials marking all those one-hit wonders of mankind's music. We always need to remember in this way that everything in life (or in what seems to be reality as we know it) defaults to music at the end of the day. And music can be intended as joyful, life-affirming as well as sad, death-embracing. The particular music-memorial I fear I may always remember from my brief visit to Cone Zero was one that 'celebrated' probably the darkest dirge that ever had the fortune to become a one-hit wonder. For the music 'personally' it was counted a fortune to be thus commemorated, but for the many who heard the music it was a misfortune, no doubt.

I was accompanied, that day, by Mitchell Much. He knew all about Cone Zero. Although he was a friend whom I had known for many years, I assumed that he was also to be an official guide for the steep tapering invert of a mountain or pyramid I envisaged the place to be. It was simply lucky (coincidental) that I already knew him. He said Cone Zero was almost impossible to negotiate on foot. I nodded knowingly. My dream of the place had been one of pumping my legs against the slope just to stand still. We needed a lop-sided 'golf buggy' of sorts to make any progress towards the stone memorials crammed in the bottom corner of the empty cone. After shuddering with delight as well as awe at my first sight of Cone Zero, he motioned me to step into the official 'buggy'. We travelled for days, and my spinning head thought it was back in the earlier dream. I wouldn't call it dizziness. A better expression would be disorientation between dream and reality, but, for this disorientation not to be counterproductive, I needed a convinced undercurrent of knowledge (knowledge rather than belief or faith) that there was nothing being dreamed about this at all. Mitchell had instilled this conviction of knowledge by a whole series of training sessions prior to our visit. I had watched screenings of Cone Zero being built from the remains of Birmingham's spaghetti junction, slowly being carved into the welcoming 'arms' of the earth, as if such a down-towering slot of slants was simply, inevitably natural. Like, in a rather trite comparison, a classic sculpture had always lived within the primeval stone from which it was eventually released by the sculptor. Or, more relevantly perhaps, a piece of music that already crouched within our ears waiting to be sprung by the composer into ordered sound from the random surroundings of noise.

"Are we there?" I had to ask. It was never certain where you truly had reached when within Cone Zero. It was as if my question was an announcement that I knew we were there. I didn't expect Mitchell to answer. His grey beard was so certain about unspoken matters that he didn't even need to nod. I could hear the cacophony of the combined music of the memorials. It had already been rising towards me for several hours above the engine noise of the buggy. It was possible (I knew from my training) to use one's sight to focus on a chosen memorial which then served to focus its music alone towards one's ears. I had already wanted to concentrate on the celebrated hit of darkest despair from the menu of memorials Mitchell had shown me during training. I believed that any despair was the most efficient path towards hope. Mitchell had not tried to dissuade me. The music was a pretty silly British cover version of an American hit novelty record of the sixties. It was sung by a group that was once famous but now completely unknown (unknown either by having been straightforwardly forgotten or by entering a mental blockage that was stronger than simply forgetting). As I speak now, it's just not there. I just can't hope to remember the name of the group. It is possibly irrelevant, anyway. Mitchell does nothing to help. He probably suffers the same blockage, but he would never admit this fact, I guess. However, by this time, he was nodding. Nodding not to indicate communication with me but nodding to the beat of the music. I feared he might soon start whistling along! God forbid that he should suddenly stand up in the buggy in some wild unspeakable outburst of karaoke! Mitchell was in danger of losing all dignity. I put my face in my hands and wept. The music was so utterly utterly wrong.

Having once focused, I now instinctively knew that I couldn't pluck my ears from the memorial's music in favour of another choice. I was aghast as it dawned on me that Mitchell's training had not warned me about any of this. I cursed him under ... my breath? No, it was under my own humming-along! As we both joined in the music's chorus in some unholy unison, I pounced upon him, eager to punish my friend-turned-enemy. But it did not stop our harmonising. Even planting my teeth in his neck could not interrupt the flow of mutual sing-along. Incredibly, the bubbling blood seemed in tune with the arcane rhythms to which Cone Zero had brought us closer. A novelty sound-effect that was both laughable and tragic: the ultimate despair. And Death gradually shrouded my bodily senses one by one as I yearned lovingly for Death's silence while remaining utterly terrified by the selfsame silence.

Mitchell Much shrugged as he drove the buggy back up the open slants of Cone Zero. He pulled the plugs from his ears with a smile. Never trust anyone when it's either you or them about to face the ultimate despair. He knew that fact as well as me, I guess. He looked down at the diminishing tunes studded like tombs on a stave. He knew that a sixties novelty record could not justly commemorate the many Fallen of life's ultimate war. The Horror was ever in the mix. Bad taste smothering one's awareness even beyond the toe-tapping of Death. In shame, he poured himself blood-tepidly into the cup of his own open mouth. Meanwhile, I am, finally, at peace, thanks to Mitchell Much, because, gratefully, I feel I no longer exist.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Hello, I don't think I'm the same Dora as the one before. As I was holding a fir cone in the air - oops, sorry, as I was holding on to come on the air, I was listening to the previous caller."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"My strobe-induced floaters were a different kettle of fish, however. They were not in the mind nor in some unreachable epoch. They really did live in my eyes. Now. Feeding off the optic juices, no doubt. Playing Tag with the odd corrosions that come off the retina. A game of Hide-and-Seek amid the rods and cones. Pinning-a-tail-on-the-donkey's-beady-eye. A Scaletrix of squint-eyed toboggans. And I could watch them. Watch the floaters play all sorts of games. Until I stopped. Because, as I bathed in the strobes, a floater bore an actual human face. A speck wading through the glaucomal ooze came into full view, sporting a moustache, a full head of hair and a double-chin that concealed where the neck ended. I could not believe my eyes. Felt like having an Internet’s dream of itself. The face was microscopic, but the curve of my eyeball seemed to magnify it sufficiently to discern features. It spoke. Or appeared to do so. My ears were, of course, not acute enough to catch what was going on in the eye-sockets. But I tried to lip-read the mouth, with my own mouth beating time with it. The face seemed to be asking for help - or was it offering help? I did not recognise the face. Probably a anthropomorphisation of the single currency. The moustache caused me to assume the male gender. It was definitely nobody I knew. Perhaps not a moustache at all, but a blindfold that had slipped down leaving its eyes about to sag out like breasts."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Here is yet another variant of a previous post. Cones in Art Literature - Page 9 - THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE


"Doone then heard a key go. This was someone, he assumed, who had more right to be in Tessa's house than a complete stranger: her husband, fresh from hospital-visiting, doffing his over-things in the hall so as to enter the chintzy parlour with a petal-based cone of forgiving flowers – or, perhaps, wanting-to-be-forgiven flowers. Only to find that Tessa wasn't there. She was in the kitchen, consigning the unspeakably jagged-mouthed baked bean can back into the flip-top waste-bin – wherein Doone heard the residue of muck resettle around its restored constituent: heard it as if it was inside his head."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

'The Angel Megazanthus' appears to be an accretive / mutant novel at least partly based on some previous stories. Thanks for continuing to quote from my work, GSC, (a great honour to me) and for becoming a bigger expert on them than I am! :)
I've collected the links here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the...e_from_dfl.htm

Yours, df lewis

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"There were perhaps a dozen of those beings within sight. No one with earthly biologic prepossessions could even have imagined them very readily. Each of them possessed a roughly globular body with the upper hemisphere swelling mid-way between pole and equator to form two neckless, conical heads. The lower hemisphere terminated in many limbs and appendages, some of which were used for walking and others solely for prehension."

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"Bert squinted through the hooded twin lenses. At first he was dazzled and confused by the rapidly whirling light-images, but these quickly resolved into geometric figures, an inconceivable number of them, extending off into limitless space in a huge arc, revolving and tumbling like the colored particles in an old-fashioned kaleidoscope. Cubes, pyramids and cones of variegated hues. Swift-rushing spheres and long slim cylinders of brilliant blue-white, gleaming disks of polished jet, spinning..."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"'And dreams are such curious things, containing knowledge we did not know we possess. And deep within our subconscious dreaming are other layers of night vision, unremembered and unsuspected. Sometimes we need assistance so as to unlock those compartments of dream.' She went to a stand and unwrapped a piece of plastic, from which she took a small cone of incense. This she placed in my lap, along with an incense burner shaped as an Eastern deity, an elephant god whose nomenclature I could not recall. 'These will help you to understand. Burn this incense before you go to sleep. Perhaps someday my mother will overcome her sense of guilt and tell you all. Please watch over her, she can be so childish at times. Oh, what a creature of wild dark moods she is, with what an intricate mind she is possessed. She's mentally feral, at times savagely so - and I was borne of such madness. I thank her for it.'"

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"My room was cool and welcoming, and kneeling before the widow I welcomed fresh air with gulps of greedy inhalation. Without undressing, I sat on the bed and placed the figurine onto the bedside stand. I studied for a moment the cone of incense, studying the weird miniscule symbols that had been somehow etched into its surface. Then I placed the cone in its place on the ornament and lit it. Musky smoke found my nostrils, and deeply I breathed it in. My heavy eyes closed. Blurred lines and muted moving spots writhed before my tightly shut eyelids. They moved with shaping, until they formed an image of ancient ruins that stood upon the apex of a black hill. I floated closer to the ruins, saw within them a spot of unhallowed ground where a woman danced. She was Diane, and she danced with provocative movement before an enormous statue of an elephant god that squatted upon a jeweled throne. Dream had altered - horribly so - the features of the silent god. Its ears had lengthened, as had its blasphemous trunk. The trunk and tusks and ghastly mouth were coated with dripping gore."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The Skin Area. After their meeting, at the exhibition of war wounds at the Royal Society of Medicine's new conference hall, Travis and Catherine Austen returned to the apartment overlooking the zoo. In the lift Travis avoided her hands as she tried to embrace him. He led her into the bedroom. Mouth pursed, she watched as he showed her the set of Enneper's models. "What are they?" She touched the interlocking cubes and cones, mathematical models of pseudo-space. "Fusing sequences, Catherine - for a doomsday weapon." Later, the sexual act between them became a hasty eucharist of the angular dimensions of the apartment. In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of the curvilinear dome of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range. Here the circular target areas became identified in Travis's mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns. Searching for her, he and Catherine Austen drove around the darkening countryside, lost among the labyrinth of hoardings. The faces of Sigmund Freud and Jeanne Moreau presided over their last bitter hours.

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I am afraid I have said very little about the astonishing flora and fauna on Venus, and it is obvious that I cannot do justice to this tremendous subject in these few lines. I hope some day, as a matter of fact, to write a monograph on the explanation, in their mythologies, for the similarity of flowers and trees found on Venus, on Aldebaran Minor, and in the Hesperide System.

The Goffur plant is popular with Venusian women who use its flowers as decorations in their homes. The long, waving Snake plant was called so by the colonists because of the soft, sibilant hissing of its leaves. The Sova plant, which releases an almost invisible mist when clumsily handled, usually puts the person handling it to sleep. And then there is the Bibul Tree, at the feet of which Venusian sages have taught since time immemorial, - a huge purple cone that whispers with a particular language of its own when the rains come.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Just found this:

Cone-nundrum (2003) (dir. Alan Estridge) (animation)

About the film:

"Alan's first film, the award-winning Cone-nundrum, is a traditional 2D piece exploring a young boy's problems distinguishing dreams from reality."

"A boy dreams of ice cream. Or is it a dream? Ice cream blurs the line between reality and the subconscious in this "thrilla in vanilla."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The Cone Gatherers by Robin Jenkins

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...AL._SS500_.jpg

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"'You say the idea came to you in a dream?' the voice jabbed out. 'You're sure no one else gave it to you?'

'No,' M. said flatly. A couple of feet away from him a spot lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge, and swung around on him again.

'You talked it over with your friends?'

'Only the first theory,' M. explained quietly. 'About the possibility of flight.'

'But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it quiet from them?'

M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. 'I was afraid they wouldn't understand what I meant.'"

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"Using the jutting thumb as a stair rail, I climbed up onto the palm and began my ascent. The skin was harder than I expected, barely yielding to my weight. Quickly I walked up the sloping forearm and the bulging balloon of the biceps. The face of the drowned giant loomed to my right, the cavernous nostrils and huge flanks of the cheeks like the cone of some freakish volcano."

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"The giant's remaining foot rose into the air, a steel hawser fixed to the large toe, evidently in preparation for the following day. The surrounding beach had been disturbed by a score of workmen, and deep ruts marked the ground where the hands and foot had been hauled away. A dark brackish fluid leaked from the stumps, and stained the sand and the white cones of the cuttlefish. As I walked down the shingle I noticed that a number of jocular slogans, swastikas, and other signs had been cut into the gray skin, as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite. The lobe of one of the ears was pierced by a spear of timber, and a small fire had burned out in the center of the chest, blackening the surrounding skin. The fine wood ash was still being scattered by the wind."

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"H'anna read aloud the translated title on the plaque. 'The Black Messenger.' She read more. 'They don't know what kind of material it was carved from. A kind of resin, they think, perhaps secreted by insect colonies cultivated for such a purpose; the Tikkihotto were known to breed certain insect species for food and silk.' She again lifted her gaze to the sculpture.

Whatever it was made of, it was entirely ebon in color, the silvery black of hematite. It was a crouching, sphinx-like hybrid, with the longer forelimbs of a hyena, and stylized folded bird-like wings. Atop its head was a crown with three cones. And there was no face on the creature's head. No snarling demon's visage with mere eyes and fangs could have disturbed her more than this."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

(At long last, I have discovered what I was hoping to find... a passage in which both "cone" and "zero" appear.)

"Gusts of vapour spurted from the Titan as it sat on its launcher. Its tanks were being steam-scoured and vented, fuelling clamps waited ready to pump their lox and kerosene into the beast's violent belly. Instrumentation arms extended from the armature of the launch ramp and clasped the nose cone, delicate fingers slid electric pencils into the contact breakers of the guidance system below the war-head, a stream of coded voltages tripped the priming circuits of the nuclear bomb, selecting - so Wayne guessed - an air-burst a thousand feet above the centre of Las Vegas, over a ground-zero where Steiner and Anne Summers were now embracing below the wing of the parked aircraft."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Wow!
Great you found it.
Even greater that you chose to seek it.
Thanks.

PS: Anne Summers?

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"For Vaughan, the colour-keyed interiors of the Lincoln and the other cars which he began to steal for an hour or so each evening exactly simulated the skin areas of the young whores whom he undressed as I drove along the darkened expressways. Their bare thighs modulated the panels of pastel vinyl; the deep-cone speakers recapitulated the contours of their sharp breasts."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"As he climbed the embankment, the last of the parachutes had fallen into the fields to the west of Lunghua Camp. The murmur of the B-29's engines faded over the Yangtze. Jim approached the scarlet canopy, large enough to cover a house, which lay across the embankment. He gazed at the lustrous material, more luxurious than any fabric he had ever seen, at the immaculate stitching and seams, at the white cords that trailed into the culvert beside the canal.

The canister had burst on impact. Jim lowered himself down the slope of sunbaked earth and squatted by the open mouth of the cylinder. Around him, on the floor of the culvert, was a ransom of canned food and cigarette packets. The canister was crammed with cardboard cartons, and one had broken loose from the nose cone and scattered its contents over the ground. Jim crawled among the cans, wiping his eyes so that he could read the labels. There were tins of Spam, Klim and Nescafé, bars of chocolate and cellophaned packs of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, bundles of Reader's Digest and Life magazines, Time and Saturday Evening Post."

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Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Passing the ticket booth, he propelled himself slowly along the mezzanine, and paused by the rail to read the signs over the cloakroom doors, their luminous letters reflecting the light. A circular corridor led around the auditorium, the lamp throwing a pale cone of light down the solid black water. In the faint hope that the dykes would be repaired, the management of the planetarium had sealed a second inner ring of barricades around the auditorium, locked into place by padlocked cross-bars which had now rusted into immovable bulkheads."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"I could hear the freaks wailing and babbling down by the animal cages, as I threaded my way between the deserted sideshow tents and ticket booths which filled all the dismal acres between Sally's tent and the west side of the concession. The moon was hidden behind heavy clouds, and the stars looked very cold and remote as I moved through the thick darkness toward Jim Dickson's tent.

There was a light in Jim's tent. The canvas was illumined just a little on the outside. A spectral, dully glowing cone it was, in the darkness. I pulled back the flap and stepped inside."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Glancing up uncertainly at the high distant ring of the jungle looming out of the darkness like the encircling lip of an extinct volcanic cone, Kerans led the way across the pavement to the nearest buildings. They stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchins and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor, sand dollars flowering in the former ticket booth."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"'The dollar was for the spaghetti,' explained a man with a prosthetic arm and a leather cone where his nose should have been. 'My wife would have told you about that when she invited you, because you're a celebrity and we certainly don't want to charge you, but if we made an exception, well, everyone would want the dollar back. But you can have as much spaghetti as you want.' He pulled the cone forward on its elastic band and scratched at the raw, red scar-tissue beneath. 'Actually, I'll tell you what: come on in the bathroom for a couple of minutes and I can slip the buck back to you, they'll never know.' Roger slipped sidewise around a bookcase and left the man scratching."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"On the circular bandstand a brass band had moved in; a little kid with a reedy voice and a cowboy hat sang into the mike. Kids were still swarming everywhere.

He walked to the corner, ducking the ones coming out of the corner drug store dripping ice cream cones and greasy popcorn. He crossed over to La Fonda, only because there weren't kids there."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since in mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos, hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from the sky and certain individuals had suffered mental change after gazing at it."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a special shrine as a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons it was lost amidst the chaos of war and the destruction of the great polar city where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a nameless peril of inner earth, the whereabouts of the sinister cube from space were unknown."

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"Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in midair - a sphere that shone like translucent ivory."

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"It may be well to remark in passing, that in none of the treatises on the subject of this paper which have fallen under our cognizance, have we observed any suggestion of a method- other than those which apply alike to all ciphers- for the solution of the cipher by scytala. We read of instances, indeed, in which the intercepted parchments were deciphered; but we are not informed that this was ever done except accidentally. Yet a solution might be obtained with absolute certainty in this manner. The strip of skin being intercepted, let there be prepared a cone of great length comparatively- say six feet long- and whose circumference at the base shall be at least equal the length of the strip. Let this latter be rolled upon the cone near the base, edge to edge as above described; then still keeping edge to edge, and maintaining the parchment close upon the cone, let it be gradually slipped towards the apex. In this process, some of the words, syllables, or letters, whose connection is intended, will be sure to come together at that point of the cone where its diameter equals that of the scytala upon which the cipher is written. And as, in passing up the cone to its apex, all possible diameters are passed over, there is no chance of a failure. The circumference of the scytala thus ascertained, a similar one can be made and the cipher applied to it."

- "A Few Words on Secret Writing," Edgar Allan Poe

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"I raised the shell with both hands. This time I closed my eyes, and as the sounds of the ancient wind and water echoed in my ears I saw a sudden image of the lonely bay millions of years earlier. High cliffs of white shale reached to the sky, and huge reptiles sidled along the coarse beaches, baying at the grotesque armoured fish which lunged at them from the shallows. Volcanic cones ringed the horizon, their red vents staining the sky."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us.

"Tell me, Quaine,' Tallis suddenly asked, 'where would you like to be when the world ends?'"

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"During the next few days, as we checked the stores and equipment inventories and ran over the installation together, I began to wonder if Tallis had lost his sense of time. Most men left to themselves for an indefinite period develop some occupational interest: chess or an insoluble dream-game or merely a compulsive wood-whittling. But Tallis, as far as I could see, did nothing. The cabin, a three-storey drum built round a central refrigerating column, was spartan and comfortless. Tallis's only recreation seemed to be staring out at the volcano jungle. This was an almost obsessive activity - all evening and most of the afternoon he would sit up on the lounge deck, gazing out at the hundreds of extinct cones visible from the observatory, their colours running the spectrum from red to violet as the day swung round into night."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesizer, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first valley. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanos jostled together like a herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the flat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier.

I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanos ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky."

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"Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler's driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gully that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me."