Fiction

The City

by Lord Dunsany

IN TIME as well as space my fancy roams far from here. It led me once to the edge of certain cliffs that were low and red and rose up out of a desert: a little way off in the desert there was a city. It was evening, and I sat and watched the city.

Presently I saw men by threes and fours come softly stealing out of that city’s gate to the number of about twenty.

I heard the hum of men’s voices speaking at evening. “It is well they are gone,” they said. “It is well they are gone. We can do business now. It is well they are gone.” And the men that had left the city sped away over the sand and so passed into the twilight.

“Who are these men?” I said to my glittering leader.

“The poets,” my fancy answered. “The poets and artists.”

“Why do they steal away?” I said to him. “And why are the people glad that they have gone?”

He said: “It must be some doom that is going to fall on the city, something has warned them and they have stolen away. Nothing may warn the people.”

I heard the wrangling voices, glad with commerce, rise up from the city. And then I also departed, for there was an ominous look on the face of the sky.

And only a thousand years later I passed that way, and there was nothing, even among the weeds, of what had been that city.

* * *

Source: Fifty-One Tales

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Anonymous
Anonymous
8 June, 2020 12:51 pm

Cities are not natural, they’re no place to live for a human being.

RM JR
RM JR
Reply to  Anonymous
8 June, 2020 11:16 pm

Even European-like cities?

Wolf
Wolf
9 June, 2020 2:11 am

History is littered with hundreds of instances where the Jews were kicked out of the city and Nation they were living in because they were literally caught setting fire to it. The stakes have never been higher for jews than they are now. The fire of “anti-Semitism” is smouldering all over the world. The monumental monolith of bad karma the jews have coming will be indelibly written on the pages of time for all future generations to read. When that stone falls the jews will never recover. The Jews are the authors and directors of their own demise, thousands of years of dreading what they most feared is about to come to pass.