The Golden Age

Labyrinths, mirrors, precious stones

The walls of water had one more purpose: they served as clocks. On flowing into a house, water would enter a receptacle in which there was a cylinder composed of twenty-four layers. Each layer was made up of a dense aromatic essence, and the water which flowed through the receptacle dissolved one layer every hour. In this way the walls of water always expelled the fragrance of the hour so that in their every waking moment the inhabitants of the upper town knew what time it was. I found this particularly pleasant at night. Whenever I awoke in the middle of the night, the damp air would be replete with, let us say, the scent of vanilla and I would say to myself, “It is only two o’clock, I may sleep for a long time yet.” Or else I would smell oranges and know that daybreak was at hand. Even today in my Prague flat sometimes I stir in the night and, neither asleep nor fully awake, sniff the air to determine the time, at which point the smells of the city break into my reverie through the half-open window. And I ask myself what strange hour is this before my disquiet wakes me properly and it dawns on me where I am.

How happy I would be if these lines of mine inspired someone to start producing aromatic clocks! I am convinced that it would not be too difficult. There is many a sleeper who awakes to the darkness, to be smothered in the formless matter of the night so that he cannot breathe; there is a soggy, amorphous mass on top of him, and the sight of the glowing face of his watch cannot save him as the black, liquid mud that stuffs itself into his lungs, ears and brain, refuses to have anything to do with phosphorescent numerals. But the night would be powerless to resist a scent effusing in the darkness, washing into all its bays; it would have to capitulate to this amicable foe, this kindly victor, to accept the segmentation the scent was offering, to submit to the bleary but precise arithmetic. Thus would the night lose its power over the wakeful, allowing them to return to the realm of sleep, of their desires.

The water flowing out of the lake above the town was divided into several arms that divided and frayed further until in several places — on tables of rock, in the moss, in the depths of a house — the current transformed itself into a fine capillary net before the strands were gathered together again. I would often study the places where the river dissolved almost to nothing; here were labyrinths of tiny, barely visible, dissipating threads of water, zigzagging, dripping, oozing underbeds, which rose and receded and evaporated. It seemed incredible to me that a flow of water which above the town and down on the plain moved in orderly fashion in a single direction and despite the shallowness of its basin earned the designation of river in every season of the year, should now and then transform itself into this tangled web that verged on nothingness. It seemed to me that by these muddled and fading movements it revealed its true nature, the well-concealed secret of its unity and calm. The capillary labyrinth was at the heart of the double delta that spread through the town, the secret heart of the river as a whole.

The rooms of the apartments of both towns had practically no furniture, although the inhabitants of the upper town had a liking for mirrors, which made up a large proportion of the cargoes which came to the island by ship. On the walls of stone and water of the upper town there were mirrors small and large, oval, round and rectangular, in which was reflected the maze of arms of the double delta, which itself was like a mirror image. In these mirrors the labyrinth was multiplied, it gathered to its arms new braids; it seemed as though some of the currents flowed into a dark sea concealed in the depths of the mirrors, while others rose from dreamlike sources in the mirrors and gradually acquired substantiality as they went on their way. Waters that dissipated in the mirrors were constantly replaced by currents that flowed into reality from the world of reflected images.

In the rooms of the upper town it was difficult not to look at the world from the islanders’ perspective, with no significant distinction made between things and images. The heart of the double delta, the fading capillary labyrinth, which itself was on the border where being and non-being collide, was not much more substantial than its mirror image. The muddled motions of the sources were no different in kind from the motions originating in the quiverings of mirrors suspended in draughts; the water threading its way down the curtains seemed to be heading for the fantastic, hovering lake that was also the destination of imaginary, reverse waterfalls ascending out of the depths. The lake was visible on horizontal surfaces beneath real walls of falling water, while the glass of the mirrors reflected walls of water that looked like half-materialized images. It was no simple matter to distinguish real water from its mirror image. After a while anyone living among the mirrors, in a world where the things reflected were so weak and insubstantial and reflections so disengaged from things, ceased to make too great a distinction between the two.

The upper town was also the centre for the mining of precious stones. I had heard something of the island’s celebrated precious stones before I disembarked there. Down in the harbour I witnessed trading between seamen and islanders, and in upper-town apartments I saw decorations of small coloured stones set in stone walls as well as wavering figures composed of precious stones that were suspended on long threads in walls of water. I was puzzled not to see on the island anything that looked like a mine; indeed, I encountered nothing to suggest that the earth was dug. Once I got to know Karael, I asked her to show me a place where precious stones were mined. We were sitting on the terrace of her house in the upper town; she took me by the hand and led me through the wall of water into one of the rooms at the back of the house, which was up against the rock. She opened a door in the wall I had seen many times before and assumed led to some kind of closet or pantry. When she switched on the lamp I saw a narrow, damp cave.

Karael explained to me that every house in the upper town had such a door in the wall or trapdoor in the floor. The islanders mine precious stones at home. They have no regular working hours, but from time to time — typically several times a day — they go to the seams and tap away at the stones with a small hammer. There are not as many precious stones today as there once were (the rock’s productivity has gradually fallen off), but the meagre yield is sufficient for the islanders, who also make use of many of the coloured stones to decorate their dwellings. It cannot be said that they work particularly hard, nor has their work yet made it easier for them to learn the lessons the rock has to teach them; they do not read in the rock’s features which stones it is concealing and where these stones are to be found. I would maintain that the ease with which they earn their living has much to tell us about the islanders’ characters, good traits and bad, about their generosity and nobility and their lack of interest in creation and in deeper and more systematic thought.