Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 84

the city, the true City. We have come a long way to see it…"
They rode on; and soon they saw, jutting up over the shanty roofs, the
walls of windowless green towers, bright in the sunlight.
Falk's heart beat hard; and he noticed that Estrel spoke a moment to
the amulet she had been given in Besdio.
"We cannot ride the mules inside the city," she said. "We can leave
them here." They stopped at a ramshackle public stable; Estrel talked
persuasively a while in the Western tongue with the man who kept the
place, and when Falk asked what she had been asking him she said, "To
keep our mules as surety."
"Surety?"
"If we don't pay for their keep, he will keep them. You have no
money, have you?"
"No," Falk said humbly. Not only did he have no money, he had never
seen money; and though Galaktika had a word for the thing, his Forest
dialect did not.
The stable was the last building on the edge of a field of rubble and
refuse which separated the shantytown from a high, long wall of granite
blocks. There was one entrance to Es Toch for people on foot. Great
conical pillars marked the gate. On the left-hand pillar an inscription in
Galaktika was carved: REVERENCE FOR LIFE. On the right was a
longer sentence in characters Falk had never seen. There was no traffic
through the gate, and no guard.
"The pillar of the Lie and the pillar of the Secret," he said aloud as he
walked between them, refusing to let himself be overawed; but then he
entered Es Toch, and saw it, and stood still saying nothing.
The City of the Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon,
a tremendous cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls
striped with green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel
strip of a river in the shadowy depths. On the very edges of the facing
cliffs the towers of the city jutted up, hardly based on earth at all, linked
across the chasm by delicate bridgespans. Towers, roadways and bridges
ceased and the wall closed the city off again just before a vertiginous bend
of the canyon. Helicopters with diaphanous vanes skimmed the abyss, and
~ 82 ~