“Yellow of Brass…“

“When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the Pale.

Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day.”

This is the opening paragraph and a half of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Telling, part of the Hainish Cycle. What makes the passage work for me is the minimal use of adjectives and adverbs to describe this nighttime scene. The adjectives and adverbs: dull, orange. That’s it. Nouns used as adjectives (especially through prepositional phrases): brass, paste, rice, marigolds, haze, sunset, henna, passionflower, dried-blood, mud. And more to the point, all of these are earthy and distinct to a culture. Brass, turmeric, rice, saffron, henna all evoke Indian cooking in this village. The rest: paste, marigolds, dust, have, passionflower, blood, mud, all evoke an earth-bound, natural connection, and with blood and mud, a certain level of desperation in the village. What follows is that all these things are indeed so in Sutty’s life—even if only metaphorically because she’s an Observer for the Ekumen.

Note also that this is a nighttime scene. LeGuin tells us at night it was the Pale (note the capital), and summarizes the scene as daytime colors. For the sky to look like this in a village, there must be fire very close—it’s certainly not the peaceful sky most of us get to enjoy in the evening. Now how would that look?

Inkwell blackness. Black of yowling feline beyond the alley fence, of the alley itself. Black of chimney soot, of crusty syrup in a too-hot pan. Black of pen caps, binderclips, stapler and three hole punch. Purple of grapes, of eggplant. Purple of Gardeson’s Sunday stole. Purple of hyacinth and iris. He stood from his desk, cracked his back and fingers, and stepped into the evening.