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which were alive in the air, seemed to him like solid things. A house of justice became a mood of green. The fragrance of roses turned into the statues of five Africans along the street. A melody which he started to hum became a giant sun-dial. And a happy mood which seized him turned into the great tombs of the earliest mothers of that land.

5
    â€˜What manner of place is this’, he asked eventually, ‘where nothing is what it seems?’
    â€˜Everything is what it seems,’ replied his guide. ‘It’s only you who are not what you seem.’
    â€˜What am I then that I am not what I seem?’
    â€˜That is for you to say.’
    â€˜I think I am what I seem.’
    â€˜What are you then?’
    â€˜An ordinary man in a strange place.’
    â€˜Might you not be a strange man in an ordinary place?’
    â€˜How can you call this place ordinary?’ he cried to his guide. ‘Everything keeps becoming something else. I thought I saw a horse back there, but when I neared it the horse turned into mist.’
    â€˜You saw the horse in the mist. You did the seeing.’
    â€˜But everything seems to whisper.’
    â€˜You hear the whispers.’
    â€˜The air is full of sounds.’
    â€˜The air is always full of sounds.’
    â€˜Even the silences have melodies.’
    â€˜Silence is a sort of melody.’
    â€˜And where is everyone? Is this an empty city, are there no inhabitants?’
    â€˜The city sleeps. The inhabitants dream.’
    â€˜So you mean that this is an ordinary city?’
    â€˜As it should be.’
    â€˜And there is nothing odd about it?’
    â€˜Only the oddness that the few visitors bring, or that the inhabitants choose to feel.’
    He was silent. It amazed him, for a moment, to think that he could hear his guide smiling.

6
    He had been walking for a while, listening to the smile of his guide, when it occurred to him that he was entering the city for the second time. He seemed to have come back to the place just after the bridge. He became aware of it because of a mood of orange jubilation that passed above him. When he looked up he saw himself under a celebratory arch. He had passed that place before but hadn’t been aware of it. He had only been aware of the mood.
    To his consternation, he found himself walking into the city again. He went down its narrow streets, past its stained-glass houses, and past the mist which turned into a horse.
    When he looked back and saw the horse turning into fire, he screamed.
    His guide smiled. He felt the smile as a radiance of warm light, a gentle blaze.
    The melodies in the air became something that either cooled or heated his body. Some melodies almost made him quiver.
    Houses that he had passed, with their inspired rustications and their perfect caryatids, burst into splendid flames when he looked back at them. The air was full of fire. The street began to burn. The fountains spouted golden flames. Marigold fires erupted from the churches. And the house of justice was a blue furnace, burning with cool intensity into the unaltered night.
    The golden cupolas were majestic balls of rotating fire. The palaces all over the hills were a dance of flames, burning in rainbow colours. And the spires, pointing like golden-blue swords of incandescence towards the cool constellations, shimmered in the city air.
    Everything was so touched and possessed by this almost divine fire that for a long moment he could not breathe.
    The jade dragon projecting from the entablature of a bank seemed to roar with a tender blaze. The banks were aglow with silver and yellow. The streets, like a flaming ultramarine river, flowed underneath him. And yet he was not consumed. Instead, he was possessed with a happy mood, a mood of joyful fervour, of sublime terror.
    At first he had seen the place as a city of stone, then as one of water. Now he knew it to be a city of the purest fire.

7
    It was only after a while that