He had been walking for a while, listening to the smile of his guide, when it occurred to him that he was entering the city for the second time. He seemed to have come back to the place just after the bridge. He became aware of it because of a mood of orange jubilation that passed above him. When he looked up he saw himself under a celebratory arch. He had passed that place before but hadn’t been aware of it. He had only been aware of the mood.
To his consternation, he found himself walking into the city again. He went down its narrow streets, past its stained-glass houses, and past the mist which turned into a horse.
When he looked back and saw the horse turning into fire, he screamed.
His guide smiled. He felt the smile as a radiance of warm light, a gentle blaze.
The melodies in the air became something that either cooled or heated his body. Some melodies almost made him quiver.
Houses that he had passed, with their inspired rustications and their perfect caryatids, burst into splendid flames when he looked back at them. The air was full of fire. The street began to burn. The fountains spouted golden flames. Marigold fires erupted from the churches. And the house of justice was a blue furnace, burning with cool intensity into the unaltered night.
The golden cupolas were majestic balls of rotating fire. The palaces all over the hills were a dance of flames, burning in rainbow colours. And the spires, pointing like golden-blue swords of incandescence towards the cool constellations, shimmered in the city air.
Everything was so touched and possessed by this almost divine fire that for a long moment he could not breathe.
The jade dragon projecting from the entablature of a bank seemed to roar with a tender blaze. The banks were aglow with silver and yellow. The streets, like a flaming ultramarine river, flowed underneath him. And yet he was not consumed. Instead, he was possessed with a happy mood, a mood of joyful fervour, of sublime terror.
At first he had seen the place as a city of stone, then as one of water. Now he knew it to be a city of the purest fire.