As Father Sandru had warned (or was it boasted?) to Zeffer, there was no part of 
the landscape depicted there on the walls that was not haunted by some bizarre sight or 
other. Even the clouds (innocent enough, surely) shat rains of fire in one place, and 
evacuated skulls in another. Demons cavorted unchallenged over the open sky, like dancers 
possessed by some celestial music, while stars fell between them; others rose over the 
horizon, leering like emaciated fools. And in that same sky, as though to suggest that 
this was a world of perpetual twilight, teetering always on the edge of darkness and 
extinction, was a sun that was three-quarters eclipsed by an exquisitely rendered moon, 
the latter painted so cunningly it seemed to have real mass, real roundness, as it slid 
over the face of the day-star.
  	In one place there was painted a line of crowned figures-the kings and queens of 
Romania, back to ancient times-painted marching into the ground. The noble line rotted as 
it proceeded into the earth, carrion birds alighting on the descending lineage, plucking 
out regal eyes and law-giving tongues. In another place a circle of witches rose in a 
spiral from a spot marked by standing-stones; their innocent victims, babies whose fat 
had been used to make the flying ointment in which they had slathered themselves, lay 
scattered between the stones like neglected dolls.
  	And all through this world of monstrous hurts and occasional miracles, the Hunt.
  	Many of the scenes were simply documents of the vigorous beauty of the chase; 
they looked as though they could have been painted from life. There was a pack of dogs, 
white and black and pie-bald (one bitch charmingly attending to her suckling pups); some 
being muzzled by peasants, others straining on their leashes as they were led away to 
join the great assembly of hunters. Elsewhere, the dogs could be seen accompanying the 
hunters. Where the Duke had chosen to kneel and pray, a white dog knelt beside him, his 
noble head bowed by the weight of shared devotion. In another, the dogs were splashing in 
a river, attempting to catch the huge salmon outlined in the stylized blue waters. And in 
a third place, for no apparent reason but the playfulness of the artists, the role of 
dogs and men had been reversed. A long, beautiful decorated table had been set up in a 
clearing amongst the trees, and at it sat a number of finely-bred dogs, while at their 
booted feet naked men fought over scraps and bones. Closer examination showed the 
arrangement of figures to be even more anarchic than it first appeared, for there were 
thirteen dogs at the table, and in their center sat one dog with a halo perched between 
his pricked ears: a canine Last Supper. An informed observer, knowing the traditional 
positions of the Apostles, could have named them all. The writers of the Gospels were 
there in their accustomed seats; John sitting closest to his master, Judas sitting at the 
perimeter of the company, while Peter (a Saint Bernard) brooded at the other end, his 
furrowed brow suggesting he already knew he would betray his master three times before 
the long night was over.
  	Elsewhere in the landscape, the dogs were painted at far crueler work. Tearing 
rabbits apart in one place, and ripping the flesh from a cornered stag in another. In a 
third they were in a contest with a lion, and many had been traumatically injured by the 
battle. Some crawled away from the place, trailing their bowels; one had been thrown up 
into the trees, and its corpse hung there, tongue lolling. Others lay sprawled in the 
grass in pools of blood. The hunters kept their distance, no doubt waiting for the lion 
to become so weakened by blood-loss that they could close in and claim the heroic moment 
for themselves.
  	But the most perverse of all the scenes were those in which erotic love and 
hunting were conjoined.
  	There was, for instance, a place where the dogs had driven a number of naked men 
and women up a gorge, where they had encountered a group of hunters armed with spears and 
nets. The terrified couples clung to one another, but the netters and the spearers knew 
their business. Men were separated from women and the men were run through with spears, 
the women all bundled up in the nets, heaped on carts, and carried away. The sexual 
servitude that awaited them was of a very particular kind. Reading the walls from left to 
right the viewer's eye found that in an adjacent valley the women were freed from the 
nets and strapped beneath the bodies of massive centaurs, their legs stretched around the 
flanks of the animals. The women's response to this terrible violation was something the 
artists had taken some trouble to detail. One was screaming in agony, her head thrown 
back, as blood ran from the place where she was being divided. Others appeared to be in 
ecstasy at this forced marriage, pressing their faces joyously to the necks of their 
deflowerers.
  	But this part of the story did not finish there. If the 'reader', scanning these 
walls, had continued his enquiry, he would have found that some of the men had survived 
the massacre in the gorge, and returned, on a later sequence of tiles, to hunt the 
creatures that had their wives in sexual thrall. These were some of the most brilliantly 
painted sequences on the walls: the surviving lovers returning on horseback, so as to 
match their speed to that of the centaurs. Lassoes circling in the air over their heads, 
they closed on the centaurs, who were slowed down by the very women they carried around 
to pleasure them. Several were brought down by ropes around the neck, others were speared 
in the throat or flank. The women they carried were not always lucky in these encounters. 
Though no doubt their rescuers intended to free them, it was often the case that they 
perished beneath the weight of their violators, as the dying centaurs rolled over, 
crushing them. Perhaps there was some moral here-some lesson about the vulnerability of 
the innocent women when two tribes of males were set against one another; but the artists 
seemed to take too much grisly pleasure in their depictions for this to be the case. 
Rather, it appeared to be done for the pleasure of the doing; of the imagining, and of 
the rendering. There was no moral from one end of this world to the other.
  
  
  	It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and the 
spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tile: the fields of dancing demons, the fairy 
races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools draped in coats of cow-dung, the 
satyrs, the spirits of graveside, roadside and hearth-side; the weasel-kings and the 
bloated toads; and so on, and so on, behind every tree and on every cloud, sliding down 
every waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world haunted by the shapes of lust 
and animal lust and all that humanity called to its bosom in the long nights of its 
despair.
  	Though Hollywood-even in its fledgling years-was presenting itself to the world 
as the very soul of the imagination, there was nothing going on before the cameras there 
(nor would there be, ever) that could compete with what the master tile-painters and 
their apprentices had created.
  	It was, as Sandru has said, the Devil's Country.
  
  	Zeffer went to Brascov to hire men, at prices five or six times what he would 
have paid locally, because he wanted hands that could do the job with some finesse, and 
minds that could count to a higher number than their fingers. He devised the means by 
which the masterpiece could be removed himself. The tiles were meticulously numbered on 
the reverse sides and a huge legend made of the room by three cartographers he had also 
hired in the city, so that there would be a meticulous record of the way the design had 
been laid out; and an obsessive accounting of how the tiles were numbered, stacked and