They went down stone streets, with silence echoing about them. The city was empty, but he felt presences everywhere. He couldn’t explain it, but it seemed the air was watching him.
In the darkness the buildings loomed like materialised dreams. They seemed like great constructs on a giant stage set. He felt small amongst the mighty stone edifices.
They went into the city at the most mysterious time of night, when footsteps were heard and no one was seen, or when a song would drift past in the air, disembodied.
His guide was silent. But at the darkest hour he seemed to notice a golden glow beside him as they passed the open spaces with marble fountains and elegant stone monoliths where the founding fathers of legend had made the public declaration of the creation of a new civilisation.
The glow that was his guide was intense in the open legendary spaces. The marble fountains, seven in all, had the sculptings of rare ocean-bed fishes with brilliantly lit water spouting from their mouths. On the stone monoliths had been inscribed the original words of the initiators of the new civilisation – words that had the brevity and authority of universal laws. They were words of a language that he couldn’t decode, a language no longer spoken. Then he realised that all along he had assumed a similarity of language, when in fact he had been communicating with his guide beyond words.
They crossed the shining open spaces and came to an array of streets. The houses, buildings, and offices were all majestic, and all of stone, but it was of a stone that seemed in a permanent state of dreaming.
As he passed them he felt that one day he would understand their dreams.