The soapstone is cut to contain a picture. This one is wrapped in hot ice, which seems to have been frozen on another planet, it does not reveal its container. The fire shows how well they are sealed together. The photograph depicts a snowy forest calling to mind Ballard's Crystal Forest.
"
but what surprised me the most,
[...]
is how ready I was for the transformation of the forest - the crystalline trees hanging like icons in these illuminated caverns, the gemmed sheaths of leaves, melted into a lattice of prisms, through which the sun created a thousand rainbows, the birds and crocodiles frozen, like heraldic beasts in grotesque postures, sculpted in jade or quartz...
the most remarkable thing is the ease with which I accepted all these marvels as part of the natural order of things, of the internal design of the universe.
[...]
I soon came to understand that its dangers were a small price to pay for the enlightenment it brought to my life. In truth, the rest of the world seemed by contrast bland and inert, a gray pall, a zone of penumbra like some almost abandoned purgatory.
All this, my dear [...], especially the lack of surprise in itself, confirms my conviction that this illuminated forest somehow reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps the innate archaic memory of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space was the signature of every leaf or flower. It is now obvious to everyone that, in the forest, life and death each have a different meaning from that which they possess in our dull world.
[...]
Our only achievement, as lords of creation, is perhaps to have caused the separation of time and space.
the crystal forest, j.g. balalrd, p117-118
