Mushrooms and naked women

These are just the right size for the base of a cylinder to fit in. Sometimes, The River widened and became a lake, three miles, five miles, six miles across. He tried to sit up and felt, numbly, a panic.

Any other writer I know, if he were clever enough to think of the basic idea, would have abandoned it as too big and too shapeless to turn into a novel. She seemed to be asleep: Now and then, the line of the mountains curved in toward each other, and the boat shot through canyons where the narrow passage forced the current to boil through and the sky was a blue thread far far above and the black walls pressed in on them.

He spun slowly away from her, saw other naked and hairless bodies, men, women, and children, opposite him in silent spinning rows. She was naked and completely hairless. It was a gray red-flecked granite and was shaped like a mushroom.