‘[T]he doors clacked and trembled, splintering and reforming until they resembled the hungry beaks of octopi. Around us, the windows bloomed and contracted: a hundred polyps feeding on invisible food. Street lamps waved in the wind like the dismembered feelers and mouth parts of marine insects. The roofs of the tenements buckled and slid against each other, till they resembled fins, spines, scales: the brittle insignia of warlike creatures of the sea. Lichenous, wind-weathered mouldings decorating the walls of the tenements slipped and fell, became green carapaces, the shells of horse-shoe crabs.’