We were looking across the backs of houses, the fronts of houses, streets between, the dark tops of leafy trees and their gold-lit trunks, gardens of gloomy evergreens and pale shrubs, the faces of flowers white and shimmering, stone walls and stone tubs and urns, statuary, and in one small enclave a dark shining pool in which golden fish darted, Georgian pillars and Victorian porches, slate roofs gleaming like pewter and tiled roofs mat and mottled. There were wells of darkness whose depths were hidden, cobbled lanes running into mews like uncoiling snakes. The spire of St. Mark’s in Hamilton Terrace stretched to the purple sky like a finger and the spire of St. Augustine’s like a needle. Nearer to us, companionably near as we approached its level, was the long shaft of St. Saviour’s, ugly by day and beautiful by night. The trees amazed me, thousands of them, avenues of them, inky bouquets of foliage lining the streets. And everywhere were dabs and splashes of gold where the limited light caught metal and glass, not fierce and blazing as in sunshine, but tiny stars of brightness and hollow cups of it, balustrades painted with a sheen of light and windowpanes glowing fruit-colored.

London rolled away below us, to the Heath and Highgate, the towers of Somers Town and Euston, the ribbon streets of Edgware, and, like a low pyramid, Harrow-on-the-Hill. Regent’s Park lay like pastoral acres of countryside or the royal hunting ground it once was, its lake a broken piece of mirror. I recognized very little of all that then. I looked it up afterward on the map, identifying remembered domes and spires, high rise and palace, dark peaceful open space, streets on which the cars were lined up like shiny oval counters. The course of the canal was plain to see, black as oil and as gleaming, passing from the Portobello Lock into Paddington and Little Venice, a wide still stream hidden for a little while by the Maida Hill tunnel, entering the park like a river. We could see the zoo. We lay on the edge of the roof telling one another of each animal we saw, those that weren’t penned by night, a wolf, a bison, two camels. Liv claimed to have spotted a white peacock, its tail spread into a fan, but the rest of us decided it was in her imagination.