How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city-arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals-had all one fine day gone under? I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed? I miss our old city - white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe what really happened is this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.
