I search for the mustering point, and the day passes. Now I am in the outer skirts, where the streets swell and contract as they please. Fewer people, and older. A hat in one of the windows catches my eye and I stop to look at it; my eye drifts over wooden heads on stands, past the sill and down to where an anxious cloud of dust is tumbling against the base of the building, in the dry alley. Indirect sunlight sifting down from everywhere illuminates the dust faintly, and I watch the motes rise and fall in vertical orbits, on a current, I guess, of air crushed against the bricks and forced aloft. The dust looks like a woman, with a long dress and a wide hat; and now she seems closer, as though she had traversed a wide space between us and were peering through a window at me. I see her eyes, not the luster of her eyes although there was light in the face—like a face of gold ash on a wax head—and her gaze “glowed” into me, without light. Water splutters from a drainpipe opposite me, and spills down a shallow channel in the dirt along the middle of the alley, thickening with dust until its front end is a bulbous brown lip. I can’t see the woman any more, nor can I remember her face.

The ground is elevated here, the view is unobstructed and full of wind. The sheer black trench of the Idle runs away from me, black wrinkles in a grey ribbon, and on its far side is the spiracle mound of the death precinct, from which on some nights it is recounted one can see the titan form of a grinning mortuary student rearing up to set a green death taper in the sky. There’s the Embalmer’s College, crouched like a toad dropsically bloated with venom and warted over with cupolas; its presence exceeds its size, and draws attention to it among these other buildings as the eyes draw attention in the face.

I walk toward the river, and in less than a quarter of a mile I find a bridge to cross into the death district. Shreds of black crepe, and the dried husks of flowers that might have come from funeral wreaths rasp along the ground, are toyed with by the air. The bridge is encrusted with what look like brass teacups broken in half, like scales growing out of any order, embedded in yellow solder. I cross the empty bridge as the sun begins to slide down toward the backs of the mountains, and night’s elaborate mechanism whirs to life all around me. It’s just tuning up.