There was more than man’s meaning to the man-skulled bogies thumbing the skeletons of their noses, to the marrow-merry andrews scratching their armpits in a tavern light, and to the dead man, smiling through his bandages, who laid hand on my sleeve, saying in no man’s voice, There is more than man’s meaning in a stuffed man talking, split from navel to arsehole, and more in the horned ladies at your heels than a pinch of the cloven delights and the tang of sulphur. Heaven and Hell shift up and down the city. I have the God of Israel in the image of a painted boy, and Lucifer, in a woman’s shirt, pisses from a window in Damaroid Alley. See now, you shining ones, how the tuner of harps has fallen, and the painter of winds like a bag of henna into the gutter. The high hopes lie broken with broken bottles and suspender-belts, the white mud (alls like feathers, there out of Pessary Court comes the Bishop of Bumdom, dressed like a ratcatcher, a holy sister in Gamarouche Mews sharpens her index tooth on a bloodstone, two weazels couple on All Paul’s altar. It was an ungodly meaning, or the purpose of the fallen gods whose haloes magnified the wrong-cross-steepled horns on the pointed heads, that windily informed me of man’s lower walking, and, as I thrust the dead-and-bandaged and a split-like-cabbage enemy to my right side, up sidled my no-bigger-than-a-thimble friends to the naked left. He who played the sorcerer, appearing all at one time in a dozen sulphurous beckonings, saying, out of a dozen mouths, We shall be naked as the slant-thighed queens of Asia in your dreams, was a symbol in the story of man’s journey through the symboled city. And that which shifted with the greased lightning of a serpent from the nest holes in the bases of the cathedral’s pillars, tracking round the margins of the four cindery winds, was, too, a symbol in that city journey. In a mouse-tailed woman and a holy snake, the symbols of the city writhed before me. But by one red horn I had that double image, tore off the furry stays and leather jacket. We shall be naked, said Old Scratch variously emerging, as a Jewgirl crucified to the bedposts. We are all metaphors of the sound of shape of the shape of sound, break us we take another shape. Sideways the snake and the woman stroked a cross in the air. I saw the starfall that broke a cloud up, and dodged between bonnets and wheels to the iller-lit streets where I saw Daniel Dom lurching after a painted shadow.