The Streets and Parks of Ex. (from Lawrence and Melody a play by Josephine Half-Snow.) Anna: Now we are besnaked. These streets Are wound about us, silverserpent's coils Do not wind so tightly 'bout a rock As do these coils of rock about ourselves. Lawrence: S'truth! Where do they lead? Anna: My Lord, nowhere. Lawrence: Say you our city snake hath not a head? Anna: My Lord, it hath none. (from Crossroads wide as the skies by Tran Hurls) "... this is our journey through the chasms, these streets as narrow as corridors, the cul-de-sacs with the feeling of cupboards, closed and secretive, the dark walls blotched with lichen giving off the scent of old age. The buildings, vertical pinnacles of lichen, ivy, moss that die when the sun touches them but not down here, no, never, too deep ... Above our heads second and third layers of streets running through the air between the windows of the towers, netting the sky into segments, drooping like banners, thin, hard curves scoring themselves across the nimbus of the sun not at all like the lower streets lined with firm pillows under our feet, cobblestones, sea-worn rocks dry now and far from their beds, charmed to these cold valleyways by the heavy arms of dead workers long ago. No earth beneath us, this is not Gum Gooloo, Sarah had said when the city was a baby and so the stones came. Someone cries out and a shadow moves, the woman is shooing away the dust with a fan woven from dead ivy. A hollow ring, that voice, a shout to a friend, no friend replies. Gone? says the voice, Gone? Gone, to the higher streets, gone there to those trembling arcs of wire and papier mache, tough with craftsmanship the supreme virtue of Gum Gooloo binding the Exian sun to its place in the sky ..." (exceprted from The Lady in Are Park, a children's book by Bobby Joe Catcher.) "... instead of going home she would visit a small green patch of grass and trees that she had heard other people call 'Are Park.' Privately she called it her Garden because that made her feel happy and more than a little special. There were no fences around her garden. The road led straight onto the grass so that anyone could come in whenever they pleased, but she liked to pretend that she was the one who told them when they could come and when they could go. She was the Lady of the Garden and her chair of office was a budding tree-branch. The trees here were not the same as the trees in the Forest of Ex. They came from somewhere else, far away, maybe from the place where her family had lived before their house burnt down and they had to move to the city. The Lady of the Garden had no family and no-one was ever angry at her ... ... the old man explained that there were parks like this all over Ex. "Sarah didn't want them," he said. "Oscar went ahead and put them in anyway. "We need gardens," declared Oscar. Sarah didn't want anyone to see anything that reminded them of Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet, but for once everybody was against her and the gardens went ahead." Betty knew that Sarah was Sarah Featherstone who had founded Ex all those hundreds of years ago. "All of the parks are different shapes," he continued. "People fitted them in between the towers wherever they could, so you have parks that are squat and circular, like blobs, and other parks that stretch on and on like the old Wandering Park which runs from one end of the city to the other. Some parks have nothing except grass in them while some, like yours, have trees and flowers. None of them have fences and all of them are a surprise. No matter how often you find a park among these buildings it is always the last thing you expect to see."