the picture was gramma , yellow and fat and wrinkled and sluglike , her toothless mouth curved into a sunken grin , her faded , blind eyes somehow sly and cunning ; and on her head was a black , conical hat sprinkled with silver stars and glittering babylonian crescents ; at her feet were slinking black cats with eyes as yellow as urine , and the smells were pork and blindness , pork and burning , ancient stars and candles as dark as the earth in which coffins lay ; he heard words spoken from ancient books , and each word was like a stone and each sentence like a crypt reared in some stinking boneyard and every paragraph like a nightmare caravan of the plague-dead taken to a place of burning ; his eyewas the eye of a child and in that moment it opened wide in startled understanding on blackness .