It's a rare page in "This Magnificent Desolation" that isn't supersaturated with description — "the deep, leaded bellies of clouds," "a strange, dusken light," "the snow falling heavily through the darkness," "dark pews smelling of linseed and wood soap and the stale sweat of old women".
In addition to being useful for orientation in the dark, their sense of smell is important for intraspecific communication.
The smell of warm butter; the slightly sulphury smell of the eggs as they coagulate; the dark caramelising smell of the browning reactions (and, if you get distracted, the acrid smell of burning).
Instinctively, we react to snakes, thunder, the dark, the smell of rotting flesh or the sight of wildfire with fear or revulsion.
"If you go to the tombs to meditate, with all the incense, the dark, the smell of antiquity," said Mr. Onghokham, "it's easy to believe in destiny".
That facility, in the original Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, is an authentic piece of Gotham Gothic, with dark hallways smelling of industrial cleaners and bedrooms with rickety beds and ratty wool blankets.
Like most residents in California's North Bay area, Hastings woke up in the dark of night Sunday to the smell and site of blazing fires.
A human might be able to recognize the scent of coffee or an orange but would surely founder when asked to recognize smells associated with more general scenes, such as moss in a dark cave, the smell of screeching tires, or the odor of some unknown animal in a faraway forest.
At the top of a railless flight of steps, a big, beaten-up door, with layers of old paint showing through in many places, led to a wide, dark hall smelling of old dirt, still with gas brackets on the walls.
We scrambled up an incline, breathing the dark-green smell of crushed sage.
