Terra Nostra - pg. 452

But then a warm, fine drizzle began to fall that gradually extinguished the fires and the dust of the battered houses, and my fearful eyes were incapable of fixing on details; I wanted to absorb everything, to understand everything, but I was blinded by the plethora of sensations: I allowed myself to be guided by my companions, and all I knew was that as we entered the enormous city in the middle of the lake, we become lost in the labyrinths of of a market as vast as the city itself, for no matter where my bewildered feet led and no matter how far my confused eyes could see, we were completely surrounded by merchants, and a great chatter and confusion I heard among those selling gold and silver and precious stones and feathers and matles and embroidered cloths, and those who in this enormous fair were displaying the skins of ocelots and mountain lions and nutrias, and of jackals and deer, and of other predatory animals, badgers and lynx were importuning Heaven, and the male and female slaves brought there for sale, chained to tall stakes by collars about their necks, were staring at the ground, indifferent to any portents, and merchants were snuffing out with their hands the coals that had fallen upon the fragrant liquidambar tubes like those the old woman had offered me in the white hut at the foot of the rainbow, and upon the cochineal they offered for sale, and beneath the archways they were rapidly covering pottery of all kinds, from great earthen jars to little jugs, all exquisitely adorned in brilliant colors with little figures of ducks and deer and flowers; and there were casks filled with honey and molasses and other sweets, and wood: planks and braces and beams and blocks and benches and boats; and the salt and herb sellers spread hempen cloths over their merchandise; and the dealers in golden grains clasped their merchandise to their breasts, and the golden grains stored in the quills of the geese of this land spilled from the carelessly held containers; and equally frightened were the owners of dark brown-colored grains surely as precious as the gold, for I saw no one more assiduously protecting his property, little bags bursting with his stuff, similar to the beads of a precious rosary; and hurrying through this fair disrupted by the unexpected rain and waves and lightning and fire, in the distance we perceived - and only she stopped our hurried pace - a woman emerging from the haze who also seemed to be clothed in haze, for her rags were dingy white, and her step was hesitant and uncertain, and her weeping profound and lugubrious, and her face invisible behind the curtain of white hair, and her words were one long lament: "Uh, my sons! Oh, my sons! We are lost! Now we must travel far!, Oh, my sons! Where can I take you and hide you?"