Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 3

I
IMAGINE DARKNESS.
In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke.
Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had no language, and
did not know the darkness to be night.
As unremembered light brightened about him he moved, crawling,
running sometimes on all fours, sometimes pulling himself erect, but not
going anywhere. He had no way through the world in which he was, for a
way implies a beginning and an end. All things about him were tangled, all
things resisted him. The confusion of his being was impelled to movement
by forces for which he knew no name: terror, hunger, thirst, pain. Through
the dark forest of things he blundered in silence till the night stopped him,
a greater force. But when the light began again he groped on. When he
broke out into the sudden broad sunlight of the Clearing he rose upright
and stood a moment. Then he put his hands over his eyes and cried out
aloud.
Weaving at her loom in the sunlit garden, Parth saw him at the forest's
edge. She called to the others with a quick beat of her mind. But she feared
nothing, and by the time the others came out of the house she had gone
across the Clearing to the uncouth figure that crouched among the high,
ripe grasses. As they approached they saw her put her hand on his shoulder
and bend down to him, speaking softly.
She turned to them with a wondering look, saying, "Do you see his
eyes…?"
They were strange eyes, surely. The pupil was large; the iris, of a
grayed amber color, was oval lengthwise so that the white of the eye did
not show at all. "Like a cat," said Garra. "Like an egg all yolk," said Kai,
voicing the slight distaste of uneasiness roused by that small, essential
difference. Otherwise the stranger seemed only a man, under the mud and
scratches and filth he had got over his face and naked body in his aimless
struggle through the forest; at most he was a little paler-skinned than the
brown people who now surrounded him, discussing him quietly as he
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