Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

My companions did not speak, and in the early light of dawn our silent ascent was interrupted only by the sound of our feet, league after league, upon the stony earth defended by formations of strange plants grouped like the phalanxes of a vegetal army, the only growth capable of surviving on this high, arid plain, armored plants with leaves like broad sword blades beginning at the level of the ground and spreading upward like a mournful cluster of daggers searching for the light of the sun: intensely green leaves ending in sharp points from which peered the face of their own death; the points of those green daggers of the high plain were dried at the tips into yellowed, frayed, fibrous harbingers of the plant’s extinction.

As the sun grew stronger, my companions ripped from the earth rocks as sharp as the points of those desert lances and slashed the base of the plants: from the wounds flowed a thick liquid that each caught in his cupped hands; they told me to do the same; we drank. Then they plucked from the leaves of some tall, thorny shrubs a green fruit covered with fine prickly hair, peeled and ate them, and I plucked one of the same fruits. Thus we assuaged our thirst and hunger; and when we were satisfied, it was as if the senses dulled by the intensity of the night in the volcano had suddenly been awakened from sleep, as if our eyes were seeing anew. I wiped from my lips and chin the juices of that savory fruit my companions called “prickly pear,” and from the heights where we had climbed, I saw the marvel this morning held in store for me.

I saw a valley, Sire, sunken in the midst of a vast circle of bare mountains, massive stone, and quiet, extinct volcanoes. And in the center of that valley shone a silver lake. And in the center of the lake, more brilliant than the lake itself, shone a white city of tall towers and golden mists traversed by wide canals, a city of small islands, with buildings of stone and wood along the water’s edge.

I gazed in wonderment; I asked myself whether what I saw was not a dream; and as the morning mists lifted, from behind their veils appeared two snow-crowned volcanoes standing like guardians over this city. One resembled a gigantic sleeping man lying with his white head resting upon knees of black stone, and the other took the form of a reclining, sleeping woman covered by a white shroud, and in her my hallucinated eyes saw my lost lover, the princess of the butterflies, turned into icy stone.

We began our descent into the valley toward the city, and I told myself that what I was seeing was but illusion, the well-known mirage of the deserts, and my ears buzzed as if to warn me of the unreality of this new adventure, as unreal, surely, as the preceding night in the white hell in the entrails of the volcano. I did not need to ask, I knew; it was a dream. But were my naked companions also a dream, the masters of my tongue who in my infernal nightmare had been snatched from the feet of the Lords of Death and returned to life as I held them to my burning breast?

These were questions intended only for myself; let them be settled by what was to come; let my few remaining hours answer, they had no need of my questions.

Such was my silent supplication on that dawn, soon interrupted by a sequence of portents that appeared before our eyes in increasingly swift succession, as if announcing our descent from the high desert into this valley enclosed among fortresses of tall, denuded, stony, snowy mountains that stood like a mute chorus to the city lying at our feet: a tapestry of brilliant jewels.

For first there arose in the midst of the sky something I can only describe as a great thorn of fire, a blaze of fire, a second dawn, that dripped and bled as if it had pricked the dome of the sky; this fiery light was broad at its base, narrow at its apex: a pyramid of pure light; in the very center of the sky, it reached to the highest arch of the sky, shooting sparks that scintillated in such profusion it seemed to be raining stars; piercing the sky, this column had its beginnings in the earth, then grew slimmer and slimmer until it reached the sky, a pyramid whose brilliance outshone the sun.

I stopped in fear, Sire, but my young companions gently urged me forward, taking my arms, and in their eyes there was no astonishment, as if they knew, or had experienced, the vision before. And then, although there was no breeze, the lake in whose bosom this magnificent, brilliant city lay was altered; its waters boiled and foamed and rose to great heights, and the waves broke into whirling waterspouts; great was their force and height; and my astonished eyes beheld how those gigantic waves burst against the foundations of the houses by the lake shore, and many of them crumbled and sank, totally inundated.

Then even my companions paused, awaiting the end of this terrible upheaval, and I longed to know the reactions of the inhabitants of the city I had never entered but which from a distance I could see assaulted by such foreboding forces; were they weeping, were they crying out, did they feel fear, or anger? And, finally, what awaited us? For we were advancing toward that city in the midst of portents that by the very fact of their concurrence with our arrival would surely be attributed to us.

A chill ran down my back, and my companions realized it; again they gently urged me forward, as I witnessed a new calamity: a great fire fell from the sun, scattering embers and raining sparks upon the city; this comet extended across the sky, and from it were born three other comets, and all of them raced with violent force toward the east, scattering sparks behind them, until their long tails disappeared into the sky where the sun is born.

And when I turned my eyes from the heavens and looked at the ground, I saw that we were walking along an earth causeway that stretched between the land and the city; the waters had calmed and turned opaquely green, and in some places their turbulence had stirred clouds of mud, and the reeds along the shore were trembling still.

Of the first houses I saw on our approach to the city, many had been battered by the great waves, and others were burning, and lightning was flashing without the warning of thunder, setting the straw roofs on fire, and when finally my companions and I entered the city no one paid us any heed, for these shore dwellers were in a great state of agitation and confusion; people covered their mouths with their hands; some carried jugs of water to put out the fires, but the water only added to the fire, causing the flames to blaze all the higher. But then a warm, fine drizzle began to fall that gradually extinguished the fires, and a warm mist rose, mixed with the smoke from the fires and the dust of the battered houses, and my fearful eyes were incapable of fixing on details; I wanted to absorb everything, to understand everything, but I was blinded by the plethora of sensations: I allowed myself to be guided by my companions, and all I knew was that as we entered the enormous city in the middle of the lake, we became lost in the labyrinths of a market as vast as the city itself, for no matter where my bewildered feet led and no matter how far my confused eyes could see, we were completely surrounded by merchants, and a great chatter and confusion I heard among those selling gold and silver and precious stones and feathers and mantles and embroidered cloths, and those who in this enormous fair were displaying the skins of ocelots and mountain lions and nutrias, and of jackals and deer, and of other predatory animals, badgers and lynx, were importuning Heaven, and the male and female slaves brought there for sale, chained to tall stakes by collars about their necks, were staring at the ground, indifferent to any portents, and merchants were snuffing out with their hands the coals that had fallen upon the fragrant liquidambar tubes like those the old woman had offered me in the white hut at the foot of the rainbow, and upon the cochineal they offered for sale, and beneath the archways they were rapidly covering pottery of all kinds, from great earthen jars to little jugs, all exquisitely adorned in brilliant colors with little figures of ducks and deer and flowers; and there were casks filled with honey and molasses and other sweets, and wood: planks and braces and beams and blocks and benches and boats; and the salt and herb sellers spread hempen cloths over their merchandise; and the dealers in golden grains clasped their merchandise to their breasts, and the golden grains stored in the quills of the geese of this land spilled from the carelessly held containers; and equally frightened were the owners of dark brown-colored grains surely as precious as the gold, for I saw no one more assiduously protecting his property, little bags bursting with this stuff, similar to the beads of a precious rosary; and hurrying through this fair disrupted by the unexpected rain and waves and lightning and fire, in the distance we perceived — and only she stopped our hurried pace — a woman emerging from the haze who also seemed to be clothed in haze, for her rags were dingy white, and her step was hesitant and uncertain, and her weeping profound and lugubrious, and her face invisible behind the curtain of white hair, and her words were one long lament: “Oh, my sons! Oh, my sons! We are lost! Now we must travel far! Oh, my sons! Where can I take you and hide you?”