Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 23

was a kind of gateway to it made by two great pines. It was dark and still
under their boughs where they stopped.
"Come back to us, guest and brother," young Thurro said, troubled
even in his bridegroom's self-absorption by the look of that dark, vague
way Falk would be taking. Metock said only, "Give me your water-flask,
will you," and in exchange gave Falk his own flask of chased silver. Then
they parted, they going north and he west.
After he had walked a while Falk stopped and looked back. The others
were out of sight; the Ransifel trail was already hidden behind the young
trees and brush that overgrew the Hirand Road. The road looked as though
it was used, if infrequently, but had not been kept up or cleared for many
years. Around Falk nothing was visible but the forest, the wilderness. He
stood alone under the shadows of the endless trees. The ground was soft
with the fall of a thousand years; the great trees, pines and hemlocks, made
the air dark and quiet. A fleck or two of sleet danced on the dying wind.
Falk eased the strap of his pack a bit and went on.
By nightfall it seemed to him that he had been gone from the House
for a long, long time, that it was immeasurably far behind him, that he had
always been alone.
His days were all the same. Gray winter light; a wind blowing;
forest-clad hills and valleys, long slopes, brush-hidden streams, swampy
lowlands. Though badly overgrown the Hirand Road was easy to follow,
for it led in long straight shafts or long easy curves, avoiding the bogs and
the heights. In the hills Falk realized it followed the course of some great
ancient highway, for its way had been cut right through the hills, and two
thousand years had not effaced it wholly. But the trees grew on it and
beside it and all about it, pine and hemlock, vast holly-thickets on the
slopes, endless stands of beech, oak, hickory, alder, ash, elm, all
overtopped and crowned by the lordly chestnuts only now losing their last
dark-yellow leaves, dropping their fat brown burrs along the path. At night
he cooked the squirrel or rabbit or wild hen he had bagged from among the
infinity of little game that scurried and flitted here in the kingdom of the
trees; he gathered beechnuts and walnuts, roasted the chestnuts on his
campfire coals. But the nights were bad. There were two evil dreams that
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