A messenger in Alak uniform has appeared, and Makemin is interrogating him sharply. The messenger dashes off again; Makemin says something to Nikhinoch and begins pacing with signs of disgust and impatience. Nikhinoch presently comes over to me and instructs me to bring up Nardac.

“Well, but how? I can’t carry her up all those stairs.”

He tosses a glance of withering indifference over his shoulder at me, and returns to Makemin.

Jil Punkinflake and I contrive to bind Nardac to a stretcher. We find her in the bow, lying on her back, her head craned round and her glinting eyes peering steadily up toward the island. She lifts herself onto the canvas, and mildly submits to our snugging her in. I’m the stronger, so I take her feet. With some puffing and straining we convey her up the steps, hurrying, lest we be left behind.

We needn’t have bothered. Nothing has changed. Makemin is apparently still waiting for the arrival of the envoy of the local officials, or what have you. I look around in vain for a cart in which to transport my patient until it occurs to me to find Tabliq Quibli. He unerringly locates or emanates carts. I find him already seated on one already, directing the installation of our cargo, and we add Nardac to it. She is still staring at the land.

Fed up with waiting, Makemin orders the columns to take form, and, with some commotion, we enter the streets. The city is grey, damp, and built of strange materials; there are pipes running everywhere, along the streets or up the sides of houses, like clumps of noodles. The main boulevard is a wide slab of silky clay with meagre, chute-like lanes sprouting from its sides, most of them narrow, covered, and as sharply inclined as staircases. Where the slopes draw back, and the city, no longer corseted by mountains, expands to fill the basin beyond, we begin to see side streets that are more proper-looking, but they are still disproportionately small in comparison with the artery we follow now, like a snake with centipede legs. Shallow puddles everywhere reflect the sky, like cold dollops of mirror. A thickened fear, kind of a miasma, is thrown over everything like an oppressively heavy blanket. I feel exposed, although I can’t say to what. I notice the inhabitants now, at their windows, in the doorways and alley thresholds, always half in hiding and I suppose ready to flee, even if it seems as though such exertions would be beyond them. On all faces I see weariness, and velleity; a quiescent mistrust.

Vscriathjadze means “thousand waterfalls.” The broken slopes against which the city crowds its seaward edge are draped with waterfalls, many of which are used to run mills, and the water is collected in a ring-shaped reservoir encircling much of the city like a moat.