Entering the darker places: The lodge-gates in The Hound of the Baskervilles

There is so much going on in this passage that we are actually only going to focus on ONE sentence, the first sentence in the passage, in this entire lesson. But we’re going to look at it in a lot of detail.

This is a long sentence. It has five clauses:

A few minutes later we had reached the lodge-gates, a maze of fantastic tracery in wrought iron, with weather-bitten pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by the boars' heads of the Baskervilles.

Another way to look at it is like this:

A few minutes later we had reached the lodge-gates, a maze of fantastic tracery in wrought iron, with weather-bitten pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by the boars' heads of the Baskervilles.

We reached the gates, now let me spend four clauses telling you all about them.

Why spend so long describing a pair of gates?

Let’s rewrite this snippet in the simplest way possible.

Okay, that was quick. Did you feel anything reading that? Probably not. There’s no detail to engage you. Let’s try it again, this time describing the gates, but not too much.

How did that compare? Sound spooky to you? No?

Conan Doyle wrote what he wrote because each specific detail helps us create a world in our heads, and that world makes us feel a certain way.

Imagine the passage read like the one below.

Okay, maybe that is a little creepy, but it’s certainly not the same gothic feel as Conan Doyle’s original passage, and all we’ve changed are the descriptions of each element.

So let’s take a closer look at how these descriptions work.