When a forlorn hermit wakes to the palatable view of Voyleux residing deeper within the horizon's cradle, he recognizes the signals he had read about on the tenement walls. As the eye penetrates the scrawl of obelisks and scarecrows, he realizes he is drawn to the canoes that skim undulated through time on the illuminated estuaries. Lilac serpents stroll somberly and twitch their noses before patiently withering behind dandelions. Thick veils of silver dust pack as nebulous puddles suspended, breaking formation as you stare hard. The luxuriant howl of wolves wrap themselves in the thickets of areca nuts. Voyleux wraps actions and carousels in pockets of time, the traveler's mind fetches the sounds as he sees them fit. All silences are interchangeable and predestined, each assorting as ornamentations in a series of escapes and returns.
But Voyleux's aura is not constructed in the obscure realms of the fauna that precede it, or the flora that chart the upwardly route on to its terrains. In fact, the inhabitants know of the city as one stranded at an infinite harbour, which would take sail with successive superimpositions of the city on the furthest sky. So thrice in a span of every twenty-three days, the city dissolves its awnings and cupolas, folds up its beams and vaults and reorients its cobblestones so that the memory remains captured only in mirrors and letters strewn haywire.
Surely, if one checks its entails, its balustrades and tapestries, minarets and wardrobes, porcelains and brickwares, one would find the basalt blocks on which the city rests is actually a chest of cyclopedias. As two of the fellow enthusiasts lift the ancient-looking volume obscurely titled 'Porphyry of the Imaginarium: Edition XXVI', you discover the folios and cantos are in a progression of mathematical functions. Your minds have clouded with amazement and visions with gossamer films. You realize that as you sift through the inordinate particles, the strips on pages collude in patterns to form a reflection of Voyleux itself.
This discovery is an amazement and results in mild hullabaloo, initially. Soon enough the word spreads across the ghettos and condominiums, barracks and sidewalks, and everyone is assured of the hypothesis that there is an indivisible city existing only to be discovered. There is a mad zest throbbing on the veins and people circle around the ancient books on their way to florists and watchmakers, on their way back from mills and brothels. The zinc skywalks and hanging ladders and platforms lay dead as burnt tobacco in the autumnal silver moon, with couples deserting it with disdain. Instead, coughing couples upturn the innards of family heirlooms, children with green eyes exchange fritters with suspicion and cold cats cajole each other with dreams of a dairy sunshine.
But it is not assumed by anyone that Voyleux attains a malleable identity by the manner of the reflection it casts on the fovea of each of its admirers. Or its stealth infiltrators. Or its immigrants and paramours. On the dock where the city rests are incessant dalliances of the rocking waters, connected through secret pathways, to the cyclopedias that give shape to the city’s desires of reflection. The city cradles in the memories of the men who wishes to seek her, for it has stories. And all its venomous wolves and fanciful serpents, areca nuts dipped in luxuriant streams are incantations of the written word, of serpentine shapes and hardened semantics, rippling prose and sharpened serifs rupturing into un-silences and quasi-reflections. Voyleux exists in the honeycombs of fulfilment, and beyond the astronomer’s glass tower where vision reaches beyond the back of the eye. For a city, like tales, nevers leaves its corporeal trace when the chance traveler contemplates its absence, but banters his daydreams with illusions of a satisfying narrative.
