The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [15]
Alvin walked back to join her, and was surprised to find that she was trembling. ‘Why are you frightened?’ he asked. ‘We’re still safely in Diaspar. You’ve looked out of that window behind us—surely you can look out of this one as well!’
Alystra was staring at him as if he was some strange monster. By her standards, indeed, he was.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said at last. ‘Even thinking about it makes me feel colder than this wind. Don’t go any further, Alvin!’
‘But, there’s no logic in it!’ Alvin protested remorselessly. ‘What possible harm would it do you to walk to the end of this corridor and look out? It’s strange and lonely out there, but it isn’t horrible. In fact, the longer I look the more beautiful I think——’
Alystra did not stay to hear him finish. She turned on her heels and fled back down the long ramp that had brought them up through the floor of this tunnel. Alvin made no attempt to stop her, since that would have involved the bad manners of imposing one’s will upon another. Persuasion, he could see, would have been utterly useless. He knew that Alystra would not pause until she had returned to her companions. There was no danger that she would lose herself in the labyrinths of the city, for she would have no difficulty in retracing her footsteps. An instinctive ability to extricate himself from even the most complex of mazes had been merely one of the many accomplishments Man had learned since he started to live in cities. The long-extinct rat had been forced to acquire similar skills when he left the fields and threw in his lot with humanity.
Alvin waited for a moment, as if half-expecting Alystra to return. He was not surprised at her reaction—only at its violence and irrationality. Though he was sincerely sorry that she had gone, he could not help wishing that she had remembered to leave the cloak.
It was not only cold, but it was also hard work moving against the wind which sighed through the lungs of the city. Alvin was fighting both the air-current and whatever force it was that kept it moving. Not until he had reached the stone grille, and could lock his arms around its bars, could he afford to relax. There was just sufficient room for him to force his head through the opening, and even so his view was slightly restricted, as the entrance to the duct was partly recessed into the city’s wall.
Yet he could see enough. Thousands of feet below, the sunlight was taking leave of the desert. The almost horizontal rays struck through the grating and threw a weird pattern of gold and shadow far down the tunnel. Alvin shaded his eyes against the glare and peered down at the land upon which no man had walked for unknown ages.
He might have been looking at an eternally frozen sea. For mile after mile, the sand-dunes undulated into the west, their contours grossly exaggerated by the slanting light. Here and there some caprice of the wind had carved curious whirlpools and gullies in the sand, so that it was sometimes hard to realise that none of this sculpture was the work of intelligence. At a very great distance, so far away indeed that he had no way of judging their remoteness, was a range of softly-rounded hills. They had been a disappointment to Alvin; he would have given much to have seen in reality the soaring mountains of the ancient records and of his own dreams.
The sun lay upon the rim of the hills, its light tamed and reddened by the hundreds of miles of atmosphere it was traversing. There were two great black spots upon its disc; Alvin had learned from his studies that such things existed, but he was surprised that he could see them so easily. They seemed almost like a pair of eyes peering back at him as he crouched in his lonely spy-hole with the wind whistling ceaselessly past his ears.
There was no twilight. With the going of