Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 49

breadth, an immense plain of muddy waters under an immense sky: the
confluence of the Forest River with the Inland River. It was no wonder
they had heard of the Inland River even in the deep ignorance of their
isolation hundreds of miles back east in the Houses: it was so huge even
the Shing could not hide it. A vast and shining desolation of yellow-gray
waters spread from the last crowns and islets of the flooded Forest on and
on west to a far shore of hills. Falk soared like one of the river's low-flying
blue herons over the meetingplace of the waters. He landed on the western
bank and was, for the first time in his memory, out of the Forest.
To north, west, and south lay rolling land, clumped with many trees,
full of brush and thickets in the lowlands, but an open country, wide open.
Falk with easy self-delusion looked west, straining his eyes to see the
mountains. This open land, the Prairie, was believed to be very wide, a
thousand miles perhaps; but no one in Zove's House really knew.
He saw no mountains, but that night he saw the rim of the world
where it cut across the stars. He had never seen a horizon. His memory
was all encircled with a boundary of leaves, of branches. But out here
nothing was between him and the stars, which burned from the Earth's
edge upwards in a huge bowl, a dome built of black patterned with fire.
And beneath his feet the circle was completed; hour by hour the tilting
horizon revealed the fiery patterns that lay eastward and beneath the Earth.
He spent half the long winter night awake, and was awake again when that
tilting eastern edge of the world cut across the sun and daylight struck
from outer space across the plains.
That day he went on due west by the compass, and the next day, and
the next. No longer led by the meanderings Of the river, he went straight
and fast. Running the slider was no such dull game as it had been over the
water; here above uneven ground it bucked and ripped at each drop and
rise unless he was very alert every moment at the controls. He liked the
vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so
immense a domain to be alone in. The weather was mild, a calm sunlit
spell of late winter. Thinking back to the Forest he felt as if he had come
out of stifling, secret darkness into light and air, as if the prairies were one
enormous Clearing. Wild red cattle in herds of tens of thousands darkened
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