Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 24

followed him each day and always caught up with him by midnight One
was of being stealthily pursued in the darkness by a person he could never
see. The other was worse. He dreamed that he had forgotten to bring
something with him, something important, essential, without which he
would be lost. From this dream he woke and knew that it was true: he was
lost; it was himself he had forgotten. He would build up his fire then if it
was not raining and would crouch beside it, too sleepy and dream-bemused
to take up the book he carried, the Old Canon, and seek comfort in the
words which declared that when all ways are lost the Way lies clear. A
man all alone is a mi serable thing. And he knew he was not even a man
but at best a kind of half-being, trying to find his wholeness by setting out
aimlessly to cross a continent under uninterested stars. The days were all
the same, but they were a relief after the nights.
He was still keeping count of their number, and it was on the eleventh
day from the crossroads, the thirteenth of his journey, that he came to the
end of the Hirand Road. There had been a clearing, once. He found a way
through great tracts of wild bramble and second-growth birch thickets to
four crumbling black towers that stuck high up out of the brambles and
vines and mummied thistles: the chimneys of a fallen House. Hirand was
nothing now, a name. The road ended at the ruin.
He stayed around the fallen place a couple of hours, kept there simply
by the bleak hint of human presence. He turned up a few fragments of
rusted machinery, bits of broken pottery which outlive even men's bones, a
scrap of rotten cloth which fell to dust in his hands. At last he pulled
himself together and looked for a trail leading west out of the clearing. He
came across a strange thing, a field a half-mile square covered perfectly
level and smooth with some glassy substance, dark violet colored,
unflawed. Earth was creeping over its edges and leaves and branches had
scurfed it over, but it was unbroken, unscratched. It was as if the great
level space had been flooded with melted amethyst. What had it been—a
launching-field for some unimaginable vehicle, a mirror with which to
signal other worlds, the basis of a force-field? Whatever it was, it had
brought doom on Hirand. It had been a greater work than the Shing
permitted men to undertake.
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