Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall.

William Golding
About This Quote

The quote above is about the power of firelight, by which I mean light produced by the combustion of some substance. (I'm not sure what substance it refers to, but maybe something like coal or wood.) This type of light can illuminate objects in its path, although it's not very bright. When I first read this quote, I thought that maybe it was talking about how the sky looked like an island set out of the ground (or the ocean), with the trees and rocks carved out. However, that doesn't make any sense at all.

The first thing I thought of was that it described how everything was black and silver. Then I thought about what kind of tree it would be if it were carved out of ground. Basically, I thought it must be a tree shaped like a mountain.

If you look at images of mountains, you'll notice that they look like mountains carved out of some land mass. So that's what I think this is actually talking about.

Source: The Inheritors

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