a horrid region

A fabulous extended metaphor from Dorothy L. Sayers’s essay on how she learned Latin:

The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees — the sturdy accusative and infinitive, the graceful ablative absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating ut and the subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple accusative and infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.​