Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 118

spoke into it Falk sat remembering Estrel's muttered prayers to her amulet
and marveling at his own vast obtuseness. Any fool might have guessed
the thing was a transmitter; any fool but this one…"Lord Abundibot says
to come as soon as we please. He is in the East Palace," Orry announced,
and they left, Orry tossing a slip of money to the bowing waiter who saw
them out.
Spring thunderclouds had hidden stars and moon, but the streets
blazed with light. Falk went through them with a heavy heart. Despite all
his fears he had longed to see the city, elonaae, the Place of Men: but it
only worried and wearied him. It was not the crowds that bothered him,
though he had never in his memory seen more than ten houses or a
hundred people together. It was not the reality of the city that was
overwhelming, but its unreality. This was not a Place of Men. Es Toch
gave no sense of history, of reaching back in time and out in space, though
it had ruled the world for a millennium. There were none of the libraries,
schools, museums which ancient telescrolls in Zove's House had led him to
look for; there were no monuments or reminders of the Great Age of Man;
there was no flow of learning or of goods. The money used was a mere
largesse of the Shing, for there was no economy to give the place a true
vitality of its own. Though there were said to be so many of the Lords, yet
on Earth they kept only this one city, held apart, as Earth itself was held
apart from the other worlds that once had formed the League. Es Toch was
self-contained, self-nourished, rootless; all its brilliance and transcience of
lights and machines and faces, its multiplicity of strangers, its luxurious
complexity was built across a chasm in the ground, a hollow place. It was
the Place of the Lie. Yet it was wonderful, like a carved jewel fallen in the
vast wilderness of the Earth: wonderful, timeless, alien.
Their slider bore them over one of the swooping rail-less bridges
towards a luminous tower. The river far below ran invisible in darkness;
the mountains were hidden by night and storm and the city's glare.
Toolmen met Falk and Orry at the entrance to the tower, ushered them into
a valve-elevator and thence into a room whose walls, windowless and
translucent as always, seemed made of bluish, sparkling mist. They were
asked to be seated, and were served tall silver cups of some drink. Falk
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