Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 127

There were cities there, obliterated—as there were in his own mind
forgotten cities, lost places, lost names. As the aircar circled to return
eastward he said, "Tomorrow the earthquake; and Falk goes under…"
"A pity it must be so, Lord Ramarren," Abundibot said with
satisfaction. Or it seemed to Falk that he spoke with satisfaction.
Whenever Abundibot expressed any emotion in words, the expression rang
so false that it seemed to imply an opposite emotion; but perhaps what it
implied actually was a total lack of any affect or feeling whatsoever. Ken
Kenyek, white-faced and pale-eyed, with regular, ageless features, neither
showed nor pretended any emotion when he spoke or when, as now, he sat
motionless and expressionless, neither serene nor stolid but utterly closed,
self-sufficient, remote.
The aircar flashed back across the desert miles between Es Toch and
the sea; there was no sign of human habitation in all that great expanse.
They landed on the roof of the building in which Falk's room was. After a
couple of hours spent in the cold, heavy presence of the Shing he craved
even that illusory solitude. They permitted him to have it; the rest of the
afternoon and the evening he spent alone in the mist-walled room. He had
feared the Shing might drug him again or send illusions to distract and
weaken him, but apparently they felt they need take no more precautions
with him. He was left undisturbed, to pace the translucent floor, to sit still,
and to read in his book. What, after all, could he do against their will?
Again and again through the long hours he returned to the book, the
Old Canon. He did not dare mark it even with his fingernail; he only read
it, well as he knew it, with total absorption, page after page, yielding
himself to the words, repeating them to himself as he paced or sat or lay,
and returning again and again and yet again to the beginning, the first
words of the first page:
The way that can be gone
is not the eternal Way.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
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