Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 36

lovely, icy, lowland woods he was now crossing had never been tampered
with, had never seen or scented man, perhaps. And as it fell farther and
farther behind him he saw its strangeness more clearly, that house hidden
in its peaceful valley, its very foundations alive with mice that squeaked in
human speech, its people revealing a great knowledge, the truth-drug, and
a barbaric ignorance. The Enemy had been there.
That the Enemy had ever been here was doubtful. Nobody had ever
been here. Nobody ever would be. Jays screamed in the gray branches.
Frost-rimed brown leaves crackled underfoot, the leaves of hundreds of
autumns. A tall stag looked at Falk across a little meadow, motionless,
questioning his right to be there.
"I won't shoot you. Bagged two hens this morning," Falk said.
The stag stared at him with the lordly self-possession of the
speechless, and walked slowly off. Nothing feared Falk, here. Nothing
spoke to him. He thought that in the end he might forget speech again and
become as he had been, dumb, wild, unhuman. He had gone too far away
from men and had come where the dumb creatures ruled and men had
never come.
At the meadow's edge he stumbled over a stone, and on hands and
knees read weatherworn letters carved in the half-buried block: CK O.
Men had come here; had lived here. Under his feet, under the icy,
hummocky terrain of leafless bush and naked tree, under the roots, there
was a city. Only he had come to the city a millennium or two too late.

III
THE DAYS of which Falk kept no count had grown very short, and
had perhaps already passed Year's End, the winter solstice. Though the
weather was not so bad as it might have been in the years when the city
had stood aboveground, this being a warmer meteorological cycle, still it
was mostly bleak and gray. Snow fell often, not so thickly as to make the
going hard, but enough to make Falk know that if he had not had his
wintercloth clothing and sleeping-bag from Zove's House he would have
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