For all my fascination with the fabled marvels of Sippulgar, it was not an especially good time for me to be setting out on such a long excursion. Sisivondal is the chief mercantile center of western Alhanroel, where all roads that cross the heart of the continent meet, and we were coming now into the busiest season of the year, when caravans travel from all directions to unload their goods into our warehouses and to buy merchandise for their return journeys. But I will refuse Thuwayne nothing. I cherish her beyond all measure. And so, after just a few mild expressions of uneasiness about undertaking such a venture at this time of year, I put my business affairs into the hands of my most trusted assistant and made my arrangements for my visit to Sippulgar. This was in the time of Lord Confalume, who was then about thirty years into his long and glorious reign as Coronal. Prankipin was our Pontifex. In those days, you know, we enjoyed a time of great prosperity; and also it was the period when all sorts of esoteric new philosophies—sorcery, necromancy, prognostication, the worship of supernatural spirits of every kind, the opening of doors into hidden universes populated by gods and demons—were taking hold on Majipoor.
Thuwayne had been informed that her brother had begun dabbling in certain of those philosophies, and possibly had met his death as a result. I am a man of business, a practical man, concerned with shipping costs and bills of lading, not with the propitiation of demons, and I regard all these new philosophies essentially as lunacy. A few little protective amulets and talismans suffice for me, purely on the off chance that they might do some good; I go no farther into any of this occult stuff. Sippulgar was known to be a spawning-ground for the new cults, and that made me apprehensive. But, as I say, I will refuse Thuwayne nothing.
She asked me to go to Sippulgar to investigate her brother’s disappearance and probable death; and so to Sippulgar I went.
Cities are far apart on Majipoor and the road from anywhere to anywhere is usually a long one; but Sippulgar is a port city on the southern sea, and Sisivondal is a heartland city set in the midst of a bare featureless plain some thousands of miles across, far to the north, and so I found myself embarking on what I knew would be the great journey of my lifetime.
Plotting my route was easy. A dozen great highways meet in Sisivondal, intersecting like the spokes of a giant wheeclass="underline" one coming in from the great port of Alaisor in the west, five going eastward toward Castle Mount, three descending from the north, and three connecting us with the south. Sisivondal’s boulevards and avenues are laid out in concentric circles that allow easy connection from one highway to another. All along the streets that run between the circular avenues are rows of warehouses where goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent are stored. The group of warehouses I control is close by the Great Southern Highway, the one which would carry me toward my goal, and so, after issuing a last set of instructions to my staff, I set out from there early one morning on my journey toward the sea.
Sisivondal has been called “a thousand miles of outskirts.” That is unkind, but I suppose it is true. The central sector is devoted entirely to commerce, many miles of warehouses and not much else; then one passes through the suburban residential district, and beyond that lies a zone of customs sheds and repair shops, gradually trickling off into the parched treeless plain beyond. Our climate is an extremely dry one and our only vegetation is of necessity sturdy: huge lumma-lummas that look like big gray rocks, and prickly garavedas that take a whole century to bring forth their black flower-spikes, and purple-leaved camaganda palms that can go years without a drop of water. Beyond town there is no vegetation at all, only a barren, dusty plain. Not a pretty place, I suppose, but essential to the economy of our continent; and in any case I am used to it.
Gradually, as I left central Alhanroel behind, the world grew more gracious. I spent a day or two in lovely Bailemoona, which I had visited years before, a city famous for its subtle cuisine and its swarms of shining bees, large as small birds and nearly as intelligent. There I hired a carriage to take me southward through the Sulfur Desert, that region of surpassing yellowness, where amidst fantastic eroded spires of soft cream-colored stone the bizarre city of Ketheron was set, a place of twisted yellow towers that could have been the pointed caps of witches. I had been there once before too. Beyond, though, everything was new to me. The air very shortly took on a tropic moistness, becoming soft as velvet, and rain-showers fell frequently. Our caravan rode past the Cliff of Eyes, a white mountain pockmarked with hundreds of dark shining boulders that stared down at us like disapproving orbs, and then we were at the Pillars of Dvorn, two sharp-tipped blue-gray rocks set athwart the highway to mark the boundary between central and southern Alhanroel. On the far side lay Arvyanda of the golden hills: here the slopes were covered by stubby trees whose stiff oval leaves had a metallic texture and yielded a brilliant glint in the strong tropical sunlight. Already I felt very far from Sisivondal, almost on another world entirely.
Gradually the sky grew dark with a thick cover of clouds. We were coming into the jungles of Kajith Kajulon, a green empire where rain falls constantly, more rain in a week than I had seen in the past ten years, and the trunks of the trees were bright with the red and yellow splashes of enormous fungi. There was no end to the rain, nor to the clouds of insects that swarmed around us, and we were besieged by armies of scarlet lizards and loud flat-headed toads. Long chains of blue spiders hung down from every branch, eyeing us in a sinister way. We rode through Kajith Kajulon for many days. I thought my bones would melt in the humid air.
But at last we left that dense forest and emerged into the coastal province of Aruachosia, of which Sippulgar is the capital. Now we were just a few hundred miles from the sea, and the air, though warm and moist and heavy, was tempered by salty breezes out of the south. Just ahead lay the breathtaking wonder that is Sippulgar.
Everyone always calls it golden Sippulgar. Now I saw why. Its buildings, which are no more than two and three stories high, are made from a golden sandstone, flecked with bits of mica, that gleams with a dazzling brightness when the sun comes up out of the southern sea. I was amazed by the intensity of that brightness, and by the lushness of the decorative plantings that lined the streets: a hundred different kinds of tropical shrubs, all of them unknown to me, whose blossoms blazed forth in orange and green and scarlet and blue and gold, with darker ones in maroon and even jet-black interspersed among them for contrast. They exuded such a wealth of fragrance that the air itself seemed perfumed. Small wonder this district is known as the Incense Coast. I could not tell one plant from another, but I knew from a lifetime spent among bills of lading and customs forms that the region around Sippulgar was rich in cinnamon and khazil, the balsam called hinnam, thanibong trees and scarlet fhiiis, and many another scented plant, from which were produced a host of aromatic oils and gums.
I had booked a room in a hotel close to the city center, so that it would be easy for me to consult the official documents and records I needed in my quest. It was situated just a couple of blocks from the waterfront; and on my way there it was my bad luck to become entangled in a religious procession, of a sort that I soon learned was ubiquitous here. And so I stood for an hour and a half waiting amidst my baggage before I was able to cross the street and continue on to my lodgings.
Even in this era of multitudinous cults and sorceries, Sippulgar stands out for its abundance of strange creeds. Perhaps it is the heavy tropical air that spawns such credulity. At home in Sisivondal only one of these superstitions holds sway, the cult of the Beholders. All too frequently I have seen its worshippers dancing ecstatically down Grand Alaisor Avenue, strewing costly imported fiower-petals everywhere and blowing on pipes and flutes as the grotesque statuettes that are their seven sacred artifacts are carried on high, preceding the great box that they call the Ark of the Mysteries and the ebony cart that carries their high priest, who wears a mask with the visage of a terrifying yellow-eyed hound. What it is that the Beholders seek, and what they find, I will never know; but at least we have only that one cult to interrupt the smooth flow of commerce with its antics. In Sippulgar, I soon would learn, there were dozens.