Just so the film party must have come on it for the first time, nearly a year before; and just so the acute camera eye of Kelly had recorded it for him. Two thousand feet below the fluted gold canopies swam in the rising currents of air; the monastery glistened on its seven toy terraces like the layers of a wedding cake. Multi-coloured specks seethed in the lower courtyard, and a line of them weaved and swayed across the bridge of boats to the little island. There was a building on the island, a flattened obelisk with glittering white walls inclining inwards to a green roof which sloped steeply away into a thread-like gold spire. The narrow lake lay like a green cheval glass in the cleft of the valley, a score of boats drawing thin insect trails across its perfect surface. At the far side, the village began, and straggled, winking, along the shore to the monastery, and lost itself in the green hills behind. In the warm afternoon a rich and spicy smell came up out of the valley, and with it, a thin tintinnabulation of sound: the distant clink of metal on stone, snatches of music from some curious, tinkling instrument, an occasional high, disembodied cry, and, from the monastery, enclosing all the sound and regulating it, it seemed, the wafted dong and boom of a gong.
