Thomas Gainsborough The Blue Boy painting

Thomas Gainsborough The Blue Boy paintingEdvard Munch The Scream paintingGustav Klimt Mother and Child detail from The Three Ages of Woman painting
And the three went off together.
Rip never quite knew how it came about that he and Alastair went up to Dr. Kakophilos’s sitting room. It was certainly not for a drink, because there was none there; nor did he know how it was that Dr. Kakophilos came to be wearing a crimson robe embroidered with gold symbols and a conical crimson hat. It only came to him quite suddenly that Dr. Kakophilos was wearing these clothes; and when it came it set him giggling, so uncontrollably that he had to sit on the bed. And Alastair began to laugh too, and they both sat on the bed for a long time laughing.
But quite suddenly Rip found that they had stopped laughing and that Dr. Kakophilos, still looking supremely ridiculous in his sacerdotal regalia, was talking to them ponderously about time and matter and spirit and a number of things which Rip had got through forty-three eventful years without considering.
“And so,” Dr. Kakophilos was saying, “you must breathe the fire and call upon Omraz the spirit of release and journey back through the centuries and recover the garnered wisdom