Free Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

given Manhattan much thought, for it had seemed only like a lot of high gray mountains that shone at night. He was sad to leave, but imagined that there he would find fine inlets teeming with fish, comfortable huts full of anarindas, and a life not unlike the life he had known. He crossed over early one evening in late spring.

    M ANHATTAN, A high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for sure, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built. Peter Lake knew this even as he stood on the Bowery in his homespun, shell crown, and feather necklace, at five o’clock in the evening, on a Friday in May.
    He held the jug of purple clam beer in one hand, and the oily raccoon-skin bag of fish wafers in the other. He was dumbfounded, but learning fast. The first thing to happen was the theft of his canoe the minute he stepped out of it onto a pier at South Street. Hardly had he turned his back when shadowy forms emerged from the mossy pilings and sucked it in with them as if into hell. Within five minutes he saw boys carrying its splintered pieces to be sold for firewood. By the time he reached the Bowery, the wood was burning underneath the crackling flesh of fowl, pigs, and cows roasting for sale to passersby. As soon as the flames had died and yet another pig or lamb been positioned for a new burn, the sidewalk cooks had sold the ashes to gray-colored human wrecks who lugged huge bags of cinder and ash for sale to chemical companies and greenhouses. Peter Lake approached one of them and pointed at the enormous sack which almost hid its porter but for his tiny wizened head and two bloodshot popped eyes. “That’s my canoe,” he said.
    “What’s your canoe?” inquired the bulky miserable.
    “That,” answered Peter Lake, still pointing to the sack.
    “That’s your canoe, huh,” said the ashman, regarding Peter Lake up and down from his shell crown to his muskrat booties. “Well then, you won’t mind if old Jake Salween uses it to sail to China, will you? Good day to you, m’boy! They’ll soon be taking you to Overweary’s.”
    “Overweary’s?”
    “As if you didn’t know! Outta my way, you crazy midget.”
    It seemed to Peter Lake that the city, or as much as he had seen of it, was similar to the cloud wall. Its motion, the sounds erupting from all directions, the great vitality, struck him as a cloud wall laid flat, like a boiling carpet. But, whereas the wall was white, the city was a palette of upwelling colors. Its forms and geometry entranced him—the orange blaze in clear upper windows; a gas lamp’s green and white bell-like glare; leaping tongues of fire; red-hot booming chambers in the charcoal; shoe-black horses trotting airily at the head of varnished carriages; peaked and triangular roofs; the ballet of the crowds as they took stairs, turned corners, and forged across streets; the guttural noises of machinery (he heard in the distance a deep sound like that of the cloud wall, but it was the sound of steam engines, flywheels, and presses); sails that filled the ends of streets with billows of white or sharp angular planes, and then collapsed into the bordering buildings or made of themselves a guillotine; the shouts of costumed sellers; buildings (he had never seen buildings) deep inside