Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [126]
The social life of the Islanders was organized around the Crystal Castle, though it held no power but a symbolic one. The four settlements that surrounded it were themselves long and wide tunnels, about forty feet in height, dug straight into the gemstone, in a way that left the crystal as thin as slightly tinted glass sheets, which were reinforced here and there by pillars of basalt, like some kind of Arcadian arcades. Dome-shaped houses lined these tunnels; a basalt pillar about six feet high mounted with an oil lamp stood in front of each house. A series of wells, directly linked to the hot springs, were placed at regular intervals along the central path and warmed the houses through a network of pipes of a type already known, if Nicolo Zeno is for once to be trusted, amongst the Norse dwellers of Greenland—a fact which tended to prove that the islanders were indeed their descendants.
But the most curious aspect of their organization, as one of their guides explained, was that the four villages, each set at one of the four compass points, corresponded to a season of the year, by particular settings of the pipes network: the Eastern village, Gorias, had a soft, springtime temperature, with some flower beds and bowers of small trees, and was peopled by children and adolescents, colourfully dressed and playful. Findias, in the South, was almost summery, filled with small wheat fields and springing fountains, inhabited by strong but graceful young adults dressed in white. Middle-aged persons, their hair already grey, and wearing brown clothes, lived in Murias, the Western village, where one found all sort of nuts and berries, apple orchards, and, most surprisingly under those latitudes, vines with enormous red grapes, from which they made a good ice wine that Isabella had baptized Château-Cristal. The North village was called Falias, and though it was colder than the others, the white-haired elders who lived there, all dressed in grey, remained idly seated in front of their houses, mostly occupied, it seemed, with chatting and playing board games.
In every case, as the guests were prompt to note with satisfaction, the plots and ponds (abounding with a curious amphibian animal that the Inuit recognized as the mysterious tiktaalit) were common to all. The overall atmosphere was apparently, perhaps deceptively, one of harmony and peace, though Brentford, while taking mental notes on the Greenhouse distribution, also found it a bit boring, like some kind of very sloooooow roundabout. This was not the kind of rustic Fairy Tale he wanted New Venice to become.
The Inuit, however, liked it better, to the point that they insisted on staying in Findias for the rest of the day. They were not very eager, one could tell, to return to the castle and meet the twins again, or as they called them, with a shiver of disgust, tyakutyik—“What kind of being are these two?” as Tuluk translated to Brentford.
It was only as they sat for lunch, the day already turned to a lavender twilight, that Gabriel made his appearance in the dinner room, without the twins, who, tenderly intertwined, were still sound asleep in his room.
“Our hosts aren’t with you?” asked Brentford, knowingly.
“No, they’re playing hide-and-seek together,” said Gabriel as he sat down at the table, taking a red apple from a cut-crystal bowl.
“You missed something.”
“Did I?” asked Gabriel between two mouthfuls.
“We saw some very interesting penetration twinning.