Chapter Opening
Chapter Two is an illustrative example of how to commence a scene with pure imagery. The chapter opens with a long paragraph that is practically nothing but imagery. It is constructed on a foundation of appealing to sensory responses to shades and hues of color combined with the familiarity of the natural elements of a forest setting:
“All the colors of rust and sunset, brown-reds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly in the long leaves as the wind blew. The roots of the cooper willows, thick and ridged, were moss-green down by the running water, which like the wind moved slowly with many soft eddies and seeming pauses, held back by rocks, roots, hanging and fallen leaves.”
People-Noise
The oddness of the term “people-noise” presents opportunity to complete the portrait of with imagery that is revealing. What is people-noise as opposed to just vague, abstract noise? The description here effectively answers that question:
“There was more people-noise than usual, for fifty or sixty strangers, young men and women mostly, had come drifting in these last few days…they had followed rumor here to follow him. Yet the voices calling here and there and the babble of women bathing or children playing down by the stream, were not so loud as the morning birdsong and insect-drone and under-noise of the living forest of which the town was one element.”
New Java
New Java is introduced as one of the five big lands of the narrative; the that is farthest to the south. And yet, it remains above the equator. There, now everything that is needed to be known about New Java is known, right? Not even close and here is where imagery is essential:
“You'd get wet from all the dripping off the leaves…but if you were really inside the forest during one of those monsoons you'd hardly notice the wind was blowing; then you came out in the open and wham! got knocked off your feet by the wind and slobbered all over with the red liquid mud that the rain turned the cleared ground into”
They’re Coming
Imagery of movement—wild, uncontrollable, movement such as in a swarming attack—is used to brilliant effect to create a feeling of not just being overwhelmed, but grotesquely so. Just to make sure the sensory impact is intense enough, the otherworldly creatures being described are then compared to something almost every human can a firm hold upon as the star of their nightmares:
“There were thousands of them, thousands…the walls of the stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming, thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a little kid…Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in the daylight, seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth, and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy”
