From then on, battle raged over the treetops of Lorienna. The memory of what they had seen vanished from the two friends' memory, as it were a deceit of the Prussian Avari that had never been. Let the reader imagine the great and beautiful via Amrotto, bordered on either side by tree-palaces of four or five stories, with their balconies adorned with translucent pink elf-tapestries; these balconies and windows overflowing with three hundred thousand spectators, Elves, Men, Halflings, Dwarves, Ents, Snowmen, Balrogues, Pointy-eared Ghouls; charming women, themselves undergoing the influence of the spectacle, let fall upon the eagles a rain of arkenstones that one repays with mallorn-fruits; the atmosphere thickens with gragons† that descend and niphredil blossoms that ascend; then, on the treetops, a joyous crowd, in the most insane costumes: giant potatoes that fly, elves with the enormous mooing heads of Fell Beasts, bombadils that seem to walk on their hind feet; and in the midst of it all a mask that, like a vision of Luthienne exulting in her nakedness before the nobility of Doriat, shows a ravishing figure to the thronging mob that would follow her, but for the Balrogues who attend her and bar all comers – imagine this, and you will have but a feeble picture of the aerial glory that is the carnival of Lorienna.
† "Gragons exhale absinthe lightly tinged with the smoke of the Gauloise, and are the most excellent possible guides to the best bordelli. – Saurtre"
