touch (“fed,” “rocked them to sleep”).

The expansive nursery has a thatched floor that conjures up sounds of grass crunching under footsteps and odors emanating from decomposing plants. The intimidatingly enormous space is silent and sultry like an empty “jungle glade at hot high noon.” But then the reader hears and sees it come alive through vivid and detailed imagery:

the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

By introducing olfactory imagery, Bradbury thrusts the reader into the great outdoors, with the

green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air.

The reader hears “the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod” and “the papery rustling of vultures” before an ominous shadow of a vulture passed overhead. Bradbury heightens tension by intensifying the scene’s immediate and uncanny realism through visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory imagery:

here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

Disturbingly, these images leak outside of the nursery. Even after exiting the nursery, the father George still feels the hot sun “on his neck, still, like a hot paw” and smells blood. He hears sounds of lions roaring and people screaming. He smells the lions and “their strong odor seeping as far away as his study door.”

The nursery used to be innocent and nonthreatening, with images and sounds of characters from children’s stories: Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Doolittle, the cow jumping over the moon, a singing angel and more. Now, however, it is transformed into “yellow hot Africa” and a “bake oven with murder in the heat.” George’s children appear like not-so-innocent, creepy dolls or impersonal automatons with

cheeks like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.

Through the last part of the story, Bradbury repeats visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile imagery that eerily foreshadows the children’s murderous malevolence resulting in their parents’ deaths. These effective images include Lydia’s bloody scarf, the two familiar-sounding screams, the lions’ roars, the smell of cats, and George’s wallet:

The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.