So this is the death precinct. I find willows sighing over strewn empty streets, dust and attentive calm on the other side of the bridge. Sunset takes hours, and there are no lights lit anywhere yet. No sound but rustling skirts of air, the half-hearted whine of a shutter’s hinges, crickets who chirp two or three times and stop. I wander without thinking, and as the darkness falls I am picking my way through unlit streets with bushes growing from the pavements; in the gathering night, everything is felty and dim, the stone buildings luminous pink and silver with bare lividity, patched with lichen and veiled in ivy. I am thirsty, but the stone trough I find is too scummed over to drink from. I haven’t eaten since the morning, and so imagine the state I am in. I have wandered too long to go back, and my mind is unclear. I start pushing in at doors and even windows, and here one door opens. For a moment my thoughts are sharp again. Charred beams and broken plaster on the floor, smashed furniture, walls glow white-blue like cheeses. Here on the window sill a chipped tin cup with a little sand at the bottom is nearly full of rainwater. I drink it down carefully so as not to drink the sand. I can feel it pouring down cold into my empty stomach. There’s even a thin, narrow mattress or pad here folded on the floor. I pull my jacket around myself and lie down on my side. My body groans with fatigue but it takes me a while, or so it seems, to get to sleep, listening to the wind, and the faint sound of settling dust.

*

Ravenous morning. I am already in the streets before I wake up all the way. I hear the voices long before I begin to see people, and then only a face here a face there. Mostly white people. I am blinking all the time, but it’s hard to see. There are mortuary students everywhere, the males in vested suits with cutaways and cravats, silk hats with black crepe around the band, and the females in black dresses and flowered hats. Only those who have matriculated may wear veils. I wash my face in a fountain and take another drink—a belly filled with water doesn’t hurt so much. I decide I have to spend something; two rolls vanish without a trace. I sit for a while and wait for them to percolate through me. Then I spend the rest of my money on a proper meal.

The cemetery gardens of Dusktemper truly are the finest imaginable. Every few blocks the land opens up in stately rolling green and dark cypress yew and willow, lawns spangled with lank stones, peopled with sculptures and mausolea. Some are in immaculate condition and some falling into picturesquely complete disrepair. The eerie serenity of these places hums with an undercurrent of menace that I find appeals to me. What is the nature of this oddly soothing feeling? I have seen the gardens of the life priests and they are tranquil and beautiful, but these fantastically still, entranced graveyards fascinate me.