The city is bounded by gates of sublime artistry which no artist, even in the city, can reproduce.

No one knows how they came to be built. There are many fanciful stories about them but none is fully reliable. The greatest wonder about these doors is the scenes they reveal. Once opened, they expose sights of splendour even more striking than the gates themselves.


“…give us golden hints of higher meanings in the blackest of our basic matter”. Anon.



In Asimov’s “Nightfall” he builds upon Emerson’s idea that “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?” in a story in which the stars appear once every two thousand and fifty years, as observed in fascinated horror by one observer “Not Earths feeble thirty –six hundred Stars visible to the eye’” Lagas[earth’s sun]was in the centre of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendour that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference then the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world” The variegated splendour of the tree outside my window, my experience with the inner life of trees convinces me that the very beauty of being alive in world we never made, as someone describes it, the potential of awareness hidden/embodied by/in every moment, encapsulates a similar splendour of being. But it’s all so common. The jewels are strewn on the sand and in our eyes, have become one with the sand.