Free Tales and Imaginings by Tim Robinson

on towards that capital So had never entered. His body was stripped by scavengers, and later dragged apart by wolves. By the time peace had returned to the Empire, only his skull remained, lying near that other skull, the two in mutual unknowing.

The River
    The city is a poor place; its starved imagination holds out a beggar’s palm to the river that comes by from far-off regions of profuse eventuation. There, where the river has its gigantic infancy, the earth’s exuberance often shakes off mountain-tops which fall into the torrent and are washed clean by pounding cataracts. Drifting down calmer reaches under a potent sun, these islands soon bless themselves with forests and the song of human beings. In their generous hastening into existence the animals and blossoms of these conical floating gardens often catch up each other’s properties of passion or languor; thus motionless tigers adore each other from a distance among flowers that twine and kiss. The river’s breezes keep the initial inspirations fresh; the brown girls that flock beneath the trees have never hit upon the idea of wearing anything but sunshine and leaf-shadow, and the holy men on the island’s peaks, for all their wisdom, still tremble with the ecstasy of birth.
    These islands pass by night. Men of the city, crouched on the dark waterfront, enduring the mosquitoes, strain their eyes to make out the gleam of firelight on the breasts of the drowsing girls, and sometimes think they hear the bell-like voice of a saint celebrating the eternal rebirth of desire. By day, however, the river is a vast liquid desert, bringing to the city nothing but a sluggish procession of abominations. A dead rat swollen into a slimy bladder by the gasesof putrefaction, a rusty canister oozing yellowish oil, a trailing wrack of torn polythene sheet; such are the objects that linger in the stagnant shallows where the children play.
    The city has no buildings as tall as a grown man. It is a cringing , furtive place that expresses its claim on duration only through the hopelessness in the eyes of its people. The houses are built of things already condemned by another world as beyond use: burnt-out vehicles, torn sacks, holed petrol-cans, buckled cardboard boxes. Nearly every surface has writing on it, often slanting or upside down, stencilled in red or black or white in the urgent, abrupt script of this other world. The inhabitants smear mud over these discarded words, fearing their incomprehensible power. The little hutches are pressed closely together along the crest of the river-bank, which is broken down in several places by streamlets of sewage. Farther back from the river the shelters are more scattered over the worn earth, and the boundary of the city is loosely drawn with a strand of barbed wire on metal stakes. The people often cross the wire to hunt for fuel, following empty irrigation ditches across a plain of dried mud fissured into a pattern of crippled hexagons . Black shadows of villages erased by fire are visible on the ground here and there. The sky, always hazy, meets the plain in a flickering horizon not very far away. Once a day a food-truck comes out of this horizon, trailing a cloud of dust and followed by a pack of skinny, quarrelsome dogs. Just short of the barbed wire, under the eyes of the patiently queuing people, the truck swerves round and begins to hunt the dogs, scattering the pack, circling, skidding, jolting and roaring until a smashed body isleft lying on the ground. Then it drives up to the wire; the driver and another man leap out, grinning and swearing, and unload the food. The waiting crowd never show any interest in the spectacle of the hunt; they take the food in silence and return with it to their shelters, while the dogs snarl and fight over the bloody wreckage out on theplain. After the truck has gone, the dogs come into the city and maraud around the cooking-fires for a while. Their running and fighting, mating and excreting give the