The oyster, the size of an average rock, is rougher in appearance, less uniform in color, brilliantly pale. It's a world obstinately closed-off. However, you can open it: to do so, you have to cup it in a rag, and employ a dull, perforated blade, and go at it several times. In doing so, curious fingers get cut, nails broken: it's a dirty job. The blows you rain down upon it mark the casing with white rings, like halos.

Inside you find a whole world, to eat and drink: under a firmament (to be precise) of nacre, heavens above give way to heavens below, to create no more than a puddle, an oily olive-tinged squelch, that ebbs and flows, the smell and the sight, fringed along the edges in black lace.

On very rare occasions, scree collects [a formula pearls] in its lustrous throat. Those who find this immediately decorate themselves with it.