The fountain of forms, the coloured orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. He was looking... at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking-chair, and beyond the rocking-chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring; for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him with a kind of metaphysical terror.

His attention shifted from the geometrical constructions in brown agate to their pearly background. Its name, he knew, was 'wall'; but in experienced fact it was a living process, a continuing series of transubstantiations from plaster and whitewash into the stuff of a supernatural body - into a god-flesh that kept modulating, as he looked at it, from glory to glory.

Out of what the word-bubbles tried to explain away as mere calcimine, some shaping spirit was evoking an endless succession of the most delicately discriminated hues, at once faint and intense, that emerged out of latency and went flushing across the god-body's divinely radiant skin. Wonderful. And there must be other miracles, new worlds to conquer and be conquered by.

- Island, Aldous Huxley