My attention was caught by these mosses growing happily on some masonry high on the face of Knox Church. The light was just right. But as I moved the camera down to check that the photo I'd taken was OK, I saw below me, in the gap between the church wall and some steps, that someone had planted ...
a whole bunch of tree ferns. Obviosuly they were planted some time ago as they are now comfortably growing in this sheltered spot.
Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with the exposure to the outer air, her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt – not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did small, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her.
...
Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which he had ascended going quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.
Quotation: E.M. Forster, The Machine StopsPenguin 2011 (originally published 1928).