... Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship ... A Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole colour-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed in with each other, dripping with colours, merging overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and alconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice - paper