Urien's Voyage Read Free Page B

set.
    â€œWe did not sleep long; the coldness of the dew awakened us long before the dawn. During the nightthe sands had shifted, and we no longer recognized the hill. We set out once again, climbing always, without knowing wherewe were going, whence we had come, where we had left the ship; but soon behind us appeared the light of dawn. We had reached a very wide plateau—at least it seemed to us very wide at first—and did not realize that we had traversed it until suddenly the plateau ceased and there opened before us a mist-filled valley. We waited. Soon the light of dawn appeared behind us, and as the sun rose the mists disappeared.
    â€œThen it appeared, this prodigious city, not far from us in an immense plain. It was a gold-colored Moslem city with fantastic minarets; flights of stairs led to hanging gardens and, on terraces, mauve palms swayed. Above the town hovered fog banks penetrated by pointed minarets. The minarets were so high that the clouds remained imprisoned by them, looking for all the world like oriflammes, like oriflammes fully distended, without a wrinkle, in spite of the fluid air untroubled by the slightest breeze.
    â€œSuch, then, is our uncertainty: before high cathedrals we used to dream of mosque towers; before the minarets today, we dreamed of church steeples, and in the morning air we waited for the angelus. But in the still too cool dawn there was no sound save the unknown tremors absorbed by the empty air; suddenly with the appearance of the sun, a chant went up from a minaret, from the minaret nearest the rising sun—a strange, pathetic chant that almost made us weep. The voices quavered on a piercing note. A new chant resounded, then another; and one by one the mosques awoke melodiously as each was struck by a ray of sunlight. Soon all resounded. It was an uncanny plea brought to an end by a burst of laughter only to begin anew. Like larks, the muezzins answered each other in the dawn. They proffered questions followedby other questions, and the tallest, on the tallest minaret, lost in a cloud, said nothing.
    â€œThe music was so wonderful that we were spellbound, enraptured; then, as the voices became lower and softer, we wanted to draw nearer, unconsciously attracted by the beauty of the town and by the moving shadows of the palms. The voices became lower and lower; but as they fell, the city, staggering with the strophe, moved away from us and disintegrated; the slender minarets and palms disappeared; the stairway crumbled; through the discolored terraces of the gardens we saw the sea and the beach. It was a fleeting mirage that fluctuated with the chant. The chant ended, and this marked the end of the spell and of the fanciful city. Our frightfully constricted hearts had seemed on the verge of death.
    â€œA vanishing vision tottering on a trill, a gasping for breath—and then we saw them lying on the seaweeds; they were sleeping. Then we fled, shaking so violently that we could hardly run. Happily we were quite near the ship; we caught sight of it behind a promontory: it alone separated you from the sirens. How dangerous it would have been for you if they had been able to hear you—and we dared not shout until we were quite near you for fear that the noise would awaken them. I don’t know how we managed last night to walk so far and advance so little; I believe now that we marked time while these moving hills changed positions under our feet and that this plateau, this valley were but the effect of the spell cast by the sirens.”
    They tried then through discussion to determine how many sirens there were and marveled over their having escaped from the wily creatures.
    â€œBut tell us,” said Odinel, “what were they like?”
    â€œThey were lying in the sea-weeds,” said Agloval, “and their glowing green and brown tresses, which covered them entirely, blended with the vegetation around them; but we ran away too quickly to see