Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 27

willows. No living thing was to be seen except the red-brown cattle
grazing across the water. The silence of peace filled the wintry, sunlit
valley. Slowing his pace, he walked between kitchen-gardens to the
nearest door of the house. As he came around the knoll the place rose up
before him, walls of ruddy brick and stone reflecting in the quickened
water where the river curved. He stopped, a little daunted, thinking he had
best hail the house aloud before he went any farther. A movement in an
open window just above the deep doorway caught his eye.В As he stood
half hesitant, looking up, he felt a sudden deep, thin pain sear through his
chest just below the breastbone: he staggered and then dropped, doubling
up like a swatted spider.
The pain had been only for an instant. He did not lose consciousness,
but he could not move or speak.
People were around him; he could see them, dimly, through waves of
non-seeing, but could not hear any voices. It was as if he had gone deaf,
and his body was entirely numb. He struggled to think through this
deprivation of the senses. He was being carried somewhere and could not
feel the hands that carried him; a horrible giddiness overwhelmed him, and
when it passed he had lost all control of his thoughts, which raced and
babbled and chattered. Voices began to gabble and drone inside his mind,
though the world drifted and ebbed dim and silent about him. Who are you
are you where do you come from Falk going where going are you I don't
know are you a man west going I don't know where the way eyes a man
not a man…Waves and echoes and flights of words like sparrows,
demands, replies, narrowing, overlapping, lapping, crying, dying away to a
gray silence.
A surface of darkness lay before his eyes. An edge of light lay along
it.
A table; the edge of a table. Lamp-lit, in a dark room.
He began to see, to feel. He was in a chair, in a dark room, by a long
table on which a lamp stood. He was tied into the chair: he could feel the
cord cut into the muscles of his chest and arms as he moved a little.
Movement: a man sprang into existence at his left, another at his right.
They were sitting like him, drawn up to the table. They leaned forward and
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