“That,” he said, “that… is really bad for the eyes.”
It was a roast of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
“It’s so… black!” said Ford Prefect. “You can hardly make out its shape… light just seems to fall into it!”
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
“Your eyes just slide off it…” said Ford in wonder.
To paraphrase one of their most brilliant sons: