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civil servant who had pressed for this economy had already passed on to the other side and could no longer defend a theory that was sound at the time but no longer tenable, as he himself would have had the good sense to acknowledge: stories began circulating about souls from the other world, about ghosts and apparitions – so what else could be done but to install gates?
    And so four great cities rose up between the kingdom and the cemetery, each one facing its cardinal point, four unexpected cities which came to be known as Northern Cemetery, Southern Cemetery, Eastern Cemetery and Western Cemetery, but which were later simply referred to as Cemeteries Number One, Two, Three and Four, inasmuch as all attempts to give them more poetic or commemorative names had failed. These four cities acted as four barriers, four living walls which surrounded and protected the cemetery. The cemetery represented one hundred square kilometres of almost total silence and solitude, surrounded by the outer anthill of the living, by the sound of people shouting, hooters, outbursts of laughter and snatches of conversation, the rumbling of engines, by the interminable murmuring of nerve-cells. To arrive at the cemetery was already something of an adventure. Eventually nobody could retrace the rectilinear plan of the old roads within the cities. It was easy to say where they had passed: you only had to stand in front of one of the main gates. But leaving aside some of the longer stretches of recognisable paving, the rest had got lost in the confusion of buildings and roads, improvised to begin with and then superimposed on the original plan. Only in the open countryside was the road still the highway of the dead.
    And now the inevitable happened, although we do not know who started it or when. A summary investigation, carried out afterwards, verified cases on the outer periphery of City Number Two, the poorest city of all, and facing south, as we stated earlier: corpses buried in small private backyards beneath flowering plants which reappeared each spring. About this same time, like those great inventions which erupt in various minds simultaneously because the time has come for them to mature, in sparsely populated parts of the realm certain persons decided, for many different and sometimes contradictory reasons, to bury their dead near, or inside caves, at the side of forest paths or on some sheltered mountain slope. There were fewer prosecutions in those days and many civil servants were prepared to accept bribes. The statistics bureau announced that, according to the official registers, a lower mortality rate could be safely predicted, and this was naturally attributed to the government’s health programme, under the direct supervision of His Majesty the King. The four cities of the cemetery felt the consequences of the decline in the number of deaths. Certain businesses suffered serious losses, there were a fair number of bankruptcies, some of them fraudulent, and when it was finally recognised that, however laudable, the royal strategy for the nation’s welfare was not likely to concede immortality, a thoroughly repressive law was introduced to enforce the obedience of the masses. To no avail: after a short-lived outburst of enthusiasm, the cities stagnated and became dilapidated. Ever so slowly, the kingdom began to be repopulated with the dead. In the end, the vast central cemetery only received corpses from the four surrounding cities, which became increasingly deserted and silent. But the King was no longer there to see it.
    The King was now very old. One day, looking down from the highest terrace of the palace, he saw, despite failing eyesight, the pointed tip of a cypress tree rising above four white walls, in all probability indicating the presence of a courtyard rather than death. But one divines certain things without difficulty, especially as one gets older. The King stored every item of news and every rumour in his head, what they