I looked out and saw the shining flattened bluish-silver dragon with floating scales of garbage, along whose unevenly cobbled western bank we were now moving. On the other side there was no bank, there was merely a sheer wall of rotting leaning houses rising from their foundations which must have been many yards under the water. Oh, it was beautiful. From the picturesque thin gables of some of the houses, of which storey hung out over storey and balcony retreated under balcony, depended little spheres. Their slim light gave here and there to the sight lopsided slittish windows, a few inches of precarious coping, a wooden cross intended presumably to hold together the rotting wall but which was itself rotting. It hinted at the bony height of a building squashed between two squat elaborate buildings, quite overloaded with dilapidated balconies and gables and railings and balustradings. The lit hints merged into the rest of the scene, which was totally dark. The river’s surface, too, was hinted at by the reflectons of the spheres. Occasionally, as we watched, more lights would appear as they were lit from within the building. The face of the lighter would be seen for a few seconds beneath the sphere before stepping backwards into disappearance.

“Magical, this quarter of the city, isn’t it?” the Dictatress chuckled.

“It’s dreamlike,” I said.

“Even in the daytime it’s like that. Unreal.”

“But aren’t the people very uncomfortable living in those rotting leaning tenements?”

“They find the damp uncomfortable, but the river is their life. Look, down there—beside that sphere, quick before it is left behind us—you can catch a glimpse of their rows and rows of boats. They moor them at night. In the daytime —everything, everything from fishing to moving immense cargoes for warehouses.”

This quarter of the city seemed to last for a long time.

My eyes grew incredibly tired as they fed on sloping roofs and winding narrow stone stairways leading up under pointed unsymmetrical broken archways to queerly carved roofed bridges, boarded warehouse windows, piles of empty fungus-grown barrels, and always rows of boats on the garbage-strewn, faintly rocking water surface—all of this in glimpses, nothing ever seen as a whole, slivers of silvery-yellow sphere-light picking out anything, beautiful or ugly, but all delicious. Now that I have written that it looks silly. Delicious in a grim way. My eyelids were hard to keep up, my eyes kept sliding sideways simply unable to focus on what I delighted in seeing.

“I’m so tired, Mother,” I remembered murmuring.

I don’t often call her Mother.

“Sit up and brace yourself. In a short while you’ll be meeting some of your fellow-hostages not to mention the General—and his army. You’ll be sleeping tonight in the camp.”

“I don’t want to leave you, Mother.”

“Nonsense. You’re tired, Cija.”

“Yes.”

“She’s going into a perilous world,” Ooldra said.

“What was that?” I asked.