About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, February 24, 2006
Anjsbourg
Category: story, 05:32 PM
Anjsbourg. I remember that Allain and I stood on that ridge for a long time, staring down at the valley below us. We were both silent - it felt as though uttering a single word would have been somehow improper, as if what the place demanded was silence. We looked down over the scrubland, and the thin rim of broken houses around the outside until, in some wordless agreement, we walked down the gentle slope and into the remains of the city.
As we approached the bottom of the valley, Allain pulled on my coat a little with one hand, stopping me. He drew out a device, a radiation detector - I think you call them Geiger counters - from his pocket and did a broad sweep around us. Nothing. The odd flutter of background radiation, but nothing out of the ordinary. Not that we'd really been expecting any radiation, but we knew we had to be careful. Allain's eyes met mine - he was frowning, looked a little worried. I wondered if he was going to tell me to go back to the car. I wouldn't have gone, of course, but I would have understood his asking. Whatever happened here had happened a long time ago, but an atmosphere remained. Maybe it was just the reminders of such a quantity of human suffering.
We walked along the perimeter of the city, where the broken houses were. I was struck by how foreign they looked, how clearly unlike Perplex City. Where roofs or parts of roofs remained I could see that they were made with some pink-coloured tile and each sloped gently to one side, as if they'd been swept that way by a giant hand ruffling through them. I looked at those roofs, thinking about how the water would drip off them when it rained, and how they'd make a good place to sit in the sun. I wondered if the people here ever used to sit on their roofs, or if it just wasn't done. I thought of how there was no one to ask, and I felt like crying.
We walked on. Around a corner, between two houses, there was a mosaic on the wall. There was a sun, with a face in the middle, its mouth its eyes screwed tightly shut. There were four men standing underneath holding pointed poles - each one had a different expression on his face. One was smiling, one was crying, one was frowning and red-cheeked with anger, one had his eyes closed as though he was asleep. On the other side of the picture, the artist had put growing plants, with flowers of green and gold, red and purple. Allain and I stood and looked at this for a long time. I ran my fingers over the surface of the mosaic. To whoever made it, to the people who looked at it, it was probably as clear as day what it represented. But we had no way to know.
Further on we passed by houses with stone benches outside, set at the right angle to catch the afternoon sun, and a larger building, decorated with carved mazes like you see on some buildings in the old Town. In one house, the roof had collapsed downward, making a large sheltered area where some raccoon-like animals had built a nest. Many of the other buildings made homes for nesting birds. It seemed to me that we might have been the first people here in a hundred years, in two hundred years.
And then, we rounded a corner. There was a place, behind a large colonnaded structure where it looked as though there had once been gardens, and a triangular-shaped pool. And there, on a slight rise in the land, sheltered on three sides by collapsed walls, were two large, modern tents. Proper tents - the kind you can buy in any camping shop in Perplex City today.