"...he went afoot through the city to the palace.
"If they were city and palace.
"He didn't know." (p. 526)
Well, if it is a large number of buildings with intelligent beings living and/or working in them, then it is a "city" because that is all that the English word means. I read somewhere that ancient Babylon would have been totally regimented, not a place of freedom and opportunity like New York, but it was a city in the physical sense. And the Thalassocrat is in the "palace" so it is a palace.
"There were no streets in the usual sense, but aerial observation had disclosed an elaborate pattern in the layout of structures, about which the dwellers could not or would not speak." (p. 528)
There is a part of Liverpool where, instead of streets lined by buildings, there are buildings dotted about with open spaces between them. No doubt cities could take highly unfamiliar forms.
On t'Kela, they distinguish between "Kusulongo the City" and "Kusulongo the Mountain," so maybe their basic concept is of a Place which has a City-aspect and a Mountain-aspect?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
All the same, it's possible Suleimanites understood "city" and "palace" in ways differently from how humans like us would interpret those words. It's another way of saying they are not the same as humans are, as a species.
Ad astra! Sean
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