He is walking through the level of wind chimes. The houses on both sides are immense and gothic. Their front porches are conjoined in an endless, imposing promenade. It is a kind of light he has not experienced before, the pallid and frail light of a northern winter, crisp and white.

The wind chimes possess their own timbre and tenor. Some are sprightly like fresh melt water. Some are shrill and curt like small, vitriolic birds. Some are leaden, prophets of terror, and reverberate like the intestines of an extinct Paleolithic beast. Some are coquettish and seductive like the trills of an alto in orgasm.

He has come from the level of the glass blowers and he is still sweaty from the furnaces. He is seeking the level of the silver miners. He is ascending but also moving horizontally through an immense, perhaps endless, pyramid.

Beneath the level of the glass blowers is the level of the potters, and beneath the potters are the revolutionaries, and beneath the revolutionaries are the poets, and beneath the poets, practically subterranean, is the level of the machines, the whirring hall of iron and steel.

He walks through a canyon of sound and dying light, and he is not certain when it will leave him on the shore of consciousness.