the old city
i was walking with someone i once knew, though not too well, along a highway that crossed the mountainside, looking across a wide landscape dotted with towers, industrial stacks and tenements, and crossed with transmission lines, all among the trees. the sky felt heavy and humid. it was a thick grey, like a sheet of lead.
the mountainside, when i lived here, had been covered in forest. below it, the woodlands and plains had stretched, uninhabited, to the horizon. now as the city had grown, the road had crossed over and the industrial estates were seeping through among the trees.
my friend opened a hatch in the road by the side of the highway. a maintenance tunnel, only it descended far deeper into the ground, and when it finally reached the bottom, opened out into a vast chamber. we were standing on a street corner in the old city, the one i had grown up in and knew, even now, probably more completely and intimately than anything else in this world, buried now deep underground by time, yet full of light and people.
the weather was not much more humid than above. cars were moving up and down the street. we passed crowds of people dressed no different to ourselves, who regarded us and their situation in general with the most pleasant indifference.