I am writing this with a sense of urgency. I must quickly recount the events before I start doubting they really happened. Monday last, after business, I fell asleep as usual on the evening train. It was my way of dismissing the polluted air, the deafening drills on the scaffoldings, the raging traffic, scraping across the fuming asphalt. But that evening, I woke up with the train standing still at a quiet station I had never seen before. I was alone in the carriage. The only sound was the hiss of the brakes. The doors had already been shut. Clearly, I was on the wrong train, far from my station. It took me a minute to force the doors open just enough to slip through with my briefcase. The cold air met my face. I adjusted my mantle. ‘Terminus’. No trains until morning. I gazed at the desolate platform. The intense orange light of the sunset enhanced the melancholy atmosphere. A crooked, wooden bench presented itself to me as a solution for the night. No thank you, I thought to myself. I headed out of the station and found a main street lined with low buildings. All of them exactly the same size, converging to a central vanishing point, straight ahead. I was startled by the extreme precision of the geometry before me. Furthermore, there was another thing I couldn’t get my head around. None of the houses had windows. Nor were there any street lamps. I walked on, feeling puzzled, hoping to find a shop, an inn, someone. The seemingly endless orange light accompanied me along the barren road. No side streets. No one to be seen. Not a soul. Not a sound. No dogs barking, no birds chirping. I stopped a moment. This was a silence I had never experienced before. A stillness so acute, I found myself holding my breath. Was this an abandoned town? It couldn’t be. The walkways were clean. No nasty spiderwebs or overgrowing weeds. The town looked well-kept. Besides, there was a functioning train station. I started off again until I eventually reached the central square. Now, I call it the central square because what else could this have been? Though it was not like any city square I had ever come across. It was a vast, walled, rectangular space. No pavement, only a very short yellowish grass. At the centre was an enormous red building. Shaped like a cube, its square windows were arranged like a chessboard. Next to it was a single, pointed cypress tree. It must have been very old, judging by the mighty circumference of its trunk. Just behind the high walls of the square, rows of perfectly symmetrical arches stood out. Everything was flawlessly aligned, orderly, equidistant. Not one tile was out of place. An architecture almost childish in its simplicity, but with a precision which was not of this world. Old and new at the same time. What was this place? I must tell you, my friend, I began shaking. I even came to think I was dead. But then I looked down at my hand, clasping the handle of my leather briefcase. There was sweat, tense muscles, a smear of grease or dirt on my thumb. I was not dead. This was something else. The soft sound of my footsteps on the dried grass gave way to a sharp echo, as my heel struck the concrete floor of the red central block. I slowly stepped into the building. The immense structure was hollow. There were no stairs, no floors. The windows gaping holes on an empty frame. That neat design, the towering, triangular shadows, injected me with a strong sense of dread. I was insignificant. Perfectly alone. A microbe. The sound of my breathing mirrored the hideous geometry of my surroundings. The evening light shone through the yawning windows. It seemed fierce now. Framed by the blackness of the inside of the building. Those angular slits observed me, as if seated on the terraces of a giant, cubic arena. Then a light caught my eye. A tiny flickering flame hiding in a slice of shadow within the construction. I plucked up the courage and moved closer. As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I made out a large shape in front of me. A stone platform rose at the centre of the space. The imposing, octagonal base looked capable of supporting an enormous weight. But there was no monument on top. There was nothing. And on the pedestal, two words appeared, illuminated by the small flame. It was not a name, it was a message. An imperative. Written in a long lost tongue. Nonetheless, the message was clear, engraved in the white marble. I swiftly headed back to the station, followed by the slow sunset, which was still relentlessly bathing everything in its orange light. As the morning train approached my bustling destination, I forced down the window and took the deepest breaths I could. I furiously gasped for the polluted air, the deafening drills on the scaffoldings, the raging traffic, scraping across the fuming asphalt. Then I fell back onto the plastic seat, welcoming the devastating feeling of being alive.