Antubia is the city where in-doors and out-doors resemble one another. The citizenry spends its days between orange groves and flower gardens, seated on chaises made of bamboo and alabaster: following with the same interest the blooming of the double lilac and the debating in the parliament’s garden. Not by chance does Antubia’s long summer last: all any day’s labor requires is to shift the pots from the sheltered places to the exposed ones, and vice versa. The secret of this Antubia’s prosperity lies in a remote past: this was always a cool city with courtyards of porphyry and fountains made of a single slab of onyx. When the earth ran dry of its springs, the inhabitants, sturdy pygmies, raised Antubia on tall pilings: a full moon’s distance is all that the ground now lies from the city. Antubia’s economy is now based on a different water: the wealthy citizenry pumps up and down a stream of young ladies, trained since childhood to dance and twist contortions from the garden’s sprinklers. But it is not only Antubia’s inhabitants who live in this city: wanderers, lost, weather cock by weather cock, cat among catamarphed on catamarphed bamboo, follow the ant-ant in their wandering. In the shadow of a giant fern someone has just whispered to me that Antubia’s population is declining. ‘Who would be left at home if all the children born were compelled, like the supply of girls, to dance in rotation in the gardens?’ And if, on the other hand, no one marries because it is better not to tie yourself to a permanent spouse when you may, any day now, become the parrot of a parrot-house.’ Having heard my fears, Antubia’s citizens reassure me: ‘We know your fears. But Antubia is the city where, when you die, the right to your place in a shaded spot, with the latest news water, is passed on to the pygmy who sleeps, somewhere in a cone-shaped shell, suspended from a conelike stalk.’. _🐜🐜