Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 116

tables of gorgeous cloth, woven and plastiformed, dazzling with bright
patterned colors; he thought of Parth weaving at her small loom in the
sunlight, a pattern of white cranes on gray. "I will weave black cloth to
wear," she had said, and remembering that he chose, from all the lovely
rainbow of robes and gowns and clothing, black breeches and dark shirt
and a short black cloak of wintercloth.
"Those are a little like our clothes at home—on Werel," Orry said,
looking doubtfully for a moment at his own flame-red tunic. "Only we had
no wintercloth there. Oh, there would be so much we could take back from
Earth to Werel, to tell them and teach them, if we could go!"
They went on to an eating-place built out on a transparent shelf over
the gorge. As the cold, bright evening of the high mountains darkened the
abyss under them, the buildings that sprang up from its edges glowed
iridescent and the streets and hanging bridges blazed with lights. Music
undulated in the air about them as they ate the spice-disguised foods and
watched the crowds o f the city come and go.
Some of the people who walked in Es Toch were dressed poorly,
some lavishly, many in the transvestite, gaudy apparel that Falk vaguely
remembered seeing Estrel wear. There were many physical types, some
different from any Falk had ever seen. One group was whitish-skinned,
with blue eyes and hair like straw. Falk thought they had bleached
themselves somehow, but Orry explained they were tribesmen from an
area on Continent two, whose culture was being encouraged by the Shing,
who brought their leaders and young people here by air-car to see Es Toch
and learn its ways. "You see, prech Ramarren, it is not true that the Lords
refuse to teach the natives—it is the natives who refuse to learn. These
white ones are sharing the Lords' knowledge."
"And what have they forgotten, to earn that prize?" Falk asked, but the
question meant nothing to Orry. He knew almost nothing of any of the
"natives," how they lived or what they knew. Shopkeepers and waiters he
treated with condescension, pleasantly, as a man among inferiors. This
arrogance he might have brought from Werel; he described Kelshak
society as hierarchic, intensely conscious of each person's place on a scale
or in an order, though what established the order, what values it was
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