Tour of the Cities We Have Lost

OUR HISTORY IS A HALLWAY. IN THIS VAST SUBTERRANEAN corridor, we keep all the secret places of the world.

This wing, for example, houses our lost cities. The lost city is a thing of power, grown to enormous size through its dislocation from time and people. All the cities we have lost can be found here, all the props and scenery, the backdrops still hiding the concrete walls. The people, though, are long gone. The people’s absence is what causes our voices to echo so strangely here. Debussy knew when he wrote La cathédrale engloutie how small and dreadful sounds can be, drowned in an empty city without bodies to absorb them.

Here you may visit any city you’ve ever loved and left. Childhood playthings, cities you built with blocks or bricks or mud or logs, the tiny cities that sprang up around your toy railroad station and its whistling, smoking trains. Cities of discovery, where you first knew love, or suffered loss, or encountered meaning; these are all awaiting you in exactly the condition you found them. Now, of course, if you return to the original and excavate the source, you will find gray skies, pointless architecture, primitive inhabitants, and cumbersome grid structures. But here you will find the sky as blue as it appeared to you the day you met your husband, or your wife, or your lover.

Remembered cities are easy to rebuild. Our true specialty is the difficult cities: cities lost for centuries, cities that existed only in the collective fancies and myths of men. Here we have cities as they were. Here we have cities as we have always imagined them to be. Here, for example, is Camelot: the old, deepening light illuminating silent castle walls, the great table within, where all valor once lived and died. This is a sad place, like any lost city. Here greatness can still be felt seeping out of the soil; here only the trees remember the important things, secrets whispered in the shadow of dawn and shouted through the din of battle. All is still green in Camelot. But only the kind of green that grows over graves, that thrives in the stillness of a finished story.

This way now, a few doors and to your left: this is where we keep Ys. Wicked city once swallowed by the sea; the smell of rot and brine is strong here. The king’s daughter, Dahut, once held court in this chamber. The chamber was kept full of bodies writhing in passion and later in pain, but all this flesh has dissolved and only the violent stains spattered across cut marble speak now of Ys’s tragedy. The bronze walls are still whole and polished, the wide gates still flung open, still inviting the floods that swept the city’s innards into the ocean. You can feel it. The disease that eats the soul of a city long after the living have vanished.

Come away from there, and follow us to a city that never was. Five doors down and turn the key where it fits inside the doorplate, beneath in the golden knob. Now quickly, look away! At first glance this city will blind you. This is El Dorado, rich in cinnamon and other spices but most of all in gold. The streets, it’s true, are paved with it. The luster of this city is both vision and portent. It is the dream of wealth and death that all men dream. It is beautiful, yes, but a bloodless beauty; it has no heart, no heat, no life. A city, yet not a city; it is a prison, a mirage. We keep this one under lock and key, as you can see. A dangerous place, El Dorado. Strong poison in a golden cup.

There are so many secret cities here, once or forever lost. We can take you to Babylon, to Quivira and Cibola, to Shambhala, Thierna Na Oge, and even to Troy as it was. We can show you Xuan Pu, Basilia, Agartha, Shangri-La, Pompeii, and Caritambo, too. Cities consumed by fire and war and water. By avarice and greed and pride. All wiped out, razed, ruined, smashed, shuttered, annihilated and crushed. Gone.

We must carry torches down here, for strong light is a bath these cities can no longer stand. They would crumble to dust in daylight, like old manuscripts and maps. We must wear special gloves to handle the structures of these places, to examine the cafés and sidewalks, the cinema and stadium without risk to their form and integrity. And we must always visit in groups, for these cities can never be seen by one alone. Only for its former crowds will the city slowly stir and come to life, street by street, building by building, like an enormous diorama giving back to us the things we thought we’d lost forever.