There’s a long shallow scar immensely chiselled into the ground. In one of its sides is a series of low arched openings in a canted wall extending away from us. Each opening is lined with stone. The rails for the ore carts glimmer unrusted in each arch, like bright-sided fish in a row of black wells. Before these openings a scurf of white powder, like wheat flour, lies tamped in crescents. The excavated floor otherwise is meticulously swept, unlittered and without so much as a single stone. Not even an irregularity or crease in the surface. The ore carts that ran on those rails are lined up neatly against the low far wall and the side facing the openings; their wheels still glint showing white strips of reflection. These points of light, the wheels and the ends of the rails in the openings, are the only intensities my eyes trace. Around the steel of the rails and the wheels a transparent light trembles like water.

“Masks.”

Hurriedly we pass the spot, and the town is not far beyond it, materializing building by building out of the fog, behind many lower mounds of earth, so that I am walking a cobbled street before I know it. Everything is made of tiny ash-colored bricks, like metal ingots. Dusk, and these black doorways and small-paned windows, one precise edge after another as we walk up the street. Houses and low-walled square yards, a shop on a corner. The street is bare, though many of the houses show doors fallen in flat and broken glass in the panes. I don’t feel sheltered by these buildings, they have only added their dead stares to the dead stare that might as well be the fog, all around.

From somewhere above me and to the right a sound like the glass chimes that used to hang from the eaves of the old narrator’s house, and something else, like the noise of coins poured out spattering in a heap. It whirrs and peters out almost at once; an alarm phantom.

We are to break up and take shelter in the houses, as though the pretext of our being soldiers were abandoned. My fingers reach out and touch a piece of metal that has been welded to a window frame, as a patch or crude decoration maybe. Unlike the frame, this metal is unrusted; I brush irregularities on the surface and, bending near, I see stamped there characters I know are ancient. I touch the metal again, thinking this was made by human hands since turned to dust, before the Limiters. In the metal or in the fingers I feel that age feebly answering my thought; it stirs, then sinks too quickly away again.