The rooms of the apartments of both towns had practically no furniture, although the inhabitants of the upper town had a liking for mirrors, which made up a large proportion of the cargoes which came to the island by ship. On the walls of stone and water of the upper town there were mirrors small and large, oval, round and rectangular, in which was reflected the maze of arms of the double delta, which itself was like a mirror image. In these mirrors the labyrinth was multiplied, it gathered to its arms new braids; it seemed as though some of the currents flowed into a dark sea concealed in the depths of the mirrors, while others rose from dreamlike sources in the mirrors and gradually acquired substantiality as they went on their way. Waters that dissipated in the mirrors were constantly replaced by currents that flowed into reality from the world of reflected images.
In the rooms of the upper town it was difficult not to look at the world from the islanders’ perspective, with no significant distinction made between things and images. The heart of the double delta, the fading capillary labyrinth, which itself was on the border where being and non-being collide, was not much more substantial than its mirror image. The muddled motions of the sources were no different in kind from the motions originating in the quiverings of mirrors suspended in draughts; the water threading its way down the curtains seemed to be heading for the fantastic, hovering lake that was also the destination of imaginary, reverse waterfalls ascending out of the depths. The lake was visible on horizontal surfaces beneath real walls of falling water, while the glass of the mirrors reflected walls of water that looked like half-materialized images. It was no simple matter to distinguish real water from its mirror image. After a while anyone living among the mirrors, in a world where the things reflected were so weak and insubstantial and reflections so disengaged from things, ceased to make too great a distinction between the two.
The upper town was also the centre for the mining of precious stones. I had heard something of the island’s celebrated precious stones before I disembarked there. Down in the harbour I witnessed trading between seamen and islanders, and in upper-town apartments I saw decorations of small coloured stones set in stone walls as well as wavering figures composed of precious stones that were suspended on long threads in walls of water. I was puzzled not to see on the island anything that looked like a mine; indeed, I encountered nothing to suggest that the earth was dug. Once I got to know Karael, I asked her to show me a place where precious stones were mined. We were sitting on the terrace of her house in the upper town; she took me by the hand and led me through the wall of water into one of the rooms at the back of the house, which was up against the rock. She opened a door in the wall I had seen many times before and assumed led to some kind of closet or pantry. When she switched on the lamp I saw a narrow, damp cave.
Karael explained to me that every house in the upper town had such a door in the wall or trapdoor in the floor. The islanders mine precious stones at home. They have no regular working hours, but from time to time — typically several times a day — they go to the seams and tap away at the stones with a small hammer. There are not as many precious stones today as there once were (the rock’s productivity has gradually fallen off), but the meagre yield is sufficient for the islanders, who also make use of many of the coloured stones to decorate their dwellings. It cannot be said that they work particularly hard, nor has their work yet made it easier for them to learn the lessons the rock has to teach them; they do not read in the rock’s features which stones it is concealing and where these stones are to be found. I would maintain that the ease with which they earn their living has much to tell us about the islanders’ characters, good traits and bad, about their generosity and nobility and their lack of interest in creation and in deeper and more systematic thought.
Hot walls
As I was first approaching the island, standing on deck looking at the wide, straight streets and the sprawling palaces of the lower town, I was in little doubt that this was the capital city. But when I walked through these streets and saw that they were clogged with sand, that the interiors of the palaces were empty, their patios thick with vegetation and their facades covered over with climbing plants, I had to re-think: I now had the impression I had been washed up in a peopleless, dead town. I was to learn later that the lower town was the seat of the king and as such the island’s metropolis, but the presence of the king, a figure confined to the background, served only to intensify the sense of emptiness in the lower town, making life there all the more dreamlike, making its streets seem all the more desolate. I learned, too, that the town was not as lightly populated as I had believed at first sight, although only a few of the houses were lived in and these were scattered throughout; their occupiers stayed in them only temporarily, for reasons of trade, or the proximity of the sea, or the need to be alone.
No one had his permanent base in the lower town. At any given time almost every house was empty and it was enough to pick one out for oneself and to occupy it. Should anyone wish to settle permanently in one of these dwellings he would meet no resistance, but I do not believe that any of the islanders ever thought of doing so; indeed, for their stays in the lower town they rarely used the same house twice. I, too, in the time before I knew Karael, lived in an empty house, on a square with an equestrian monument at its centre. There I would sit at the window for days on end, watching the stone horseman’s shadow inching across the hot slabs in the manner of a great sundial. Then, out walking one day, I took a fancy to a house right on the edge of town whose windows gave onto the sandy plain; I moved into it straight away. And after I lived at my girlfriend’s I returned to the lower town for a longer stay. All the islanders lived like this. The bonds between man and woman were not particularly strong, and it was a common occurrence that one of the partners would disappear to the lower town for a good long while and then return.
The uniformity and great width of the streets gave one the impression that the lower town was vast, when in fact it was possible to get from one end to the other in a quarter of an hour. The town was built to a regular ground plan shaped like a chessboard. The visitor walked long, straight boulevards, meeting no one. From cracks in the pavement, the kind of prickly stalks grew that are everywhere to be found on the coastal flats; every corner offered up the same monotonous view of straight, empty boulevards, broken at regular intervals by the shadowy mouths of cross-streets. These straight lines appeared to be hurrying into the distance, giving the impression they wished to guide the visitor to an important destination as quickly as possible, but at the end of each street all such a visitor would find was pale, rolling sand or a wall of rock. He would pass colonnades, dry fountains whose metal basins were overgrown with thorny stalks, the flaking facades of houses and palaces with yellow grass and other vegetation growing out of their crumbling eaves and sills. He would walk past hot walls, past series of high, paneless windows; the pleasant smells of empty rooms warmed by the sun would waft towards him. From the plain, the town was penetrated by the belt of high reeds that lined the riverbank. The visitor who chose to step into this thick, damp jungle was soon surprised to find statues of sphinxes and mighty, recumbent lions, coated in a sandy soil, rotting leaves and vegetation; there was a flight of broad steps that reached down to the river and some great metal rings set in granite slabs.