Zaira

“Shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways (...) but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet; the line strung from the lamp to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession(...) A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines...View all