Thanakar, as he entered, felt that he had interrupted nothing. The chairs were not set in any kind of order, nor was there any focus of activity—no cards, tables, bottles, food, fire, conversation, nothing to make a newcomer feel either uncomfortable or welcome. One woman with tangled hair and a long gaunt face was singing to herself, music with no words, only inarticulate combinations of vowels. Nobody seemed to listen. Each one seemed imprisoned in a separate world. Thanakar noticed with no particular sensation of alarm that they all carried weapons, cruel knives, or quivers full of arrows. One man was fixing an old gun. Thanakar thought: that they even have a wall and a barricade, that they even think to protect themselves, shows how they have changed. The way they sit together shows how they have not.

No one took any notice. The antinomials seemed lost in their own occupations, whether it was stamping on the floor, or staring at nothing, or making a single repetitive motion of their hand and wrist. Still, Abu and Thanakar passed through them warily, as if through a ward of prisoners. There was no reason to fear them. These people were not slaves to passion, or violence, or even comprehension. Yet physically, they were powerful and gigantic; the light shone along their shoulders and the long muscles of their backs. And though some looked ill and hungry, none looked weak. Besides, they had rejected reason, and there was no telling when one might reach out his long arm. It didn’t happen. Abu and Thanakar walked through, and though some looked up and stared at them, most never raised their heads.

The prince had been there once before, drunk. He scarcely remembered. But still, it was easy to find the way without asking questions, because the platform shelved into the open air, out from under a crude canopy. Standing on the edge, they looked from a great height over an abandoned railway yard, left from the days when freight trains used to run down to the docks through webs of tunnels under the city.

People lived in there, a whole subterranean world. And here too: in abandoned boxcars and among rusted sidings, the antinomials had made their homes, though most preferred possessionless lives in the huge, ramshackle warehouses that fingered the yard—urban resonances of the cold communal halls they had left so long ago.

A spidery ladder led from the platform down into the yard. There was a spring wind off the river, smelling of mud and dirty water. It made the ladder tremble. Thanakar’s feet rang each steel step. It was very dark. Paradise was sunk into some clouds. And from down below, there were no strong sources of light, only glimmering lanterns and small fires. They climbed down past the mouth of one of the railway tunnels, 100 feet from upper lip to lower. Far inside, they saw a red glow, and shadows leaping on the walls.

Some long-forgotten civic pride, left over from another season, had decorated the tunnel’s mouth with colossal seated statues of Angkhdt the God of Industry, one on either side. The brick was crumbling away, but you could still recognize the outlines of the great dogs’ heads, their snouts ten feet long. The ladder wound down between them.