Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 70

"There are no humans that could do to me what the Shing did. I honor
life, I honor it because it's a much more difficult and uncertain matter than
death; and the most difficult and uncertain quality of all is intelligence.
The Shing kept their law and let me live, but they killed my intelligence. Is
that not murder? They killed the man I was, the child I had been. To play
with a man's mind so, is that reverence? Their law is a lie, and their
reverence is mockery."
Abashed by his anger, Estrel knelt by the fire cutting up and
skewering a rabbit he had shot. The dusty reddish hair curled close to her
bowed head; her face was patient and remote. As ever, she drew him to her
by compunction and desire. Close as they were, yet he never understood
her; were all women so? She was like a lost room in a great house, like a
carven box to which he did not have the key. She kept nothing from him
and yet her secrecy remained, untouched.
Enormous evening darkened. Over rain-drenched miles of earth and
grass. The little flames of their fire burned red-gold in the clear blue dusk.
"It's ready, Falk," said the soft voice.
He rose and came to her beside the fire. "My friend, my love," he said,
taking her hand a moment. They sat down side by side and shared their
meat, and later their sleep.
As they went farther west the prairies began to grow dryer, the air
clearer. Estrel guided them southward for several days in order to avoid an
area which she said was, or had been, the territory of a very wild nomad
people, the Horsemen. Falk trusted her judgment, having no wish to repeat
his experience with the Basnasska. On the fifth and sixth day of this
southward course they crossed through a hilly region and came into dry,
high terrain, flat and treeless, forever windswept. The gullies filled with
torrents during the rain, and next day were dry again. In summer this must
be semidesert; even in spring it was very dreary.
As they went on they twice passed ancient ruins, mere mounds and
hummocks, but aligned in the spacious geometry of streets and squares.
Fragments of pottery, flecks of colored glass and plastic were thick in the
spongy ground around these places. It had been two or three thousand
years, perhaps, since they had been inhabited. This vast steppe-land, good
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