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Penelope Shuttle

The Devil (from Lyonesse)

In Lyonesse the Devil is still an Englishman speaking English to all his Luciferian angels (and not some skanky language fit only for lions) as the bards frown in Cornish and the sailors off Land’s End draw up nets crammed with old doors casements and porches from the place they call The Town I’ve seen for myself a Lyonesse made of ice and air and sunshine conjured on a blue winter sea in Falmouth Bay — polychrome towers, medallioned piers, portals, spires and porticoes, columns mimicking trees and branches, hierophantic clusters of maypole belfries, courtier-like and gaudy for god, all the ruthless architectural audacity and curvaceous elaboration of the Sagrada Familia… but it was the Devil’s weather-work conjuring up a ghost-city from the last Glacial Maximum, lost Loonois gone again in an hour