Audiobook - Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - Opening, sample
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Kubla Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions. But the Emperor of the Tatars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his in the lives of emperors. There is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered and the melancholy and relief of knowing, we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandal wood ashes growing cold in the braziers. A dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planets spheres where they are portrayed and rolls up one after the other, the dispatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops from defeat to defeat and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our army's protection offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders is an endless formless ruin. That corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter. That the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kubla Khan able to discern through the walls and towers destined to crumble the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites gnawing.