If Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or demolished if there is a spell or just a whim, I do not know. The fact is that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be spread and where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky whitens any sink or bathtub or other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the branches. It seems that the plumbers had finished their work and have gone away before the bricklayers, or that their facilities, indestructible, had survived a disaster, earthquake or corrosion of termites. Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla not true desert. At any time, looking up between the pipes, it is not uncommon to see one or many young women, slender, not tall in stature, luxuriating in the bathtub, that bend under the showers suspended in space, making ablutions, or combing their long hair in the mirror. In the sun shine the threads of water fanning from the showers, the jets of taps, the spurts, splashes, foam sponges. The explanation I have come to this: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla remained possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy in the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. It may be that their invasion has driven the men, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to ingratiate himself with the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. However, now they seem content, these maidens in the morning you hear them singing.
-_-
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