The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. “These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.”

Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end.

A stranger in olondria by sofia samatar