Pewter City

A grey, orderly town built from the mountain it sits beneath, every wall cut from the same pale quarried stone. Buildings are low and squared off, with flat slate roofs and deep-set windows, laid out along straight streets paved in fitted flagstones. A large hall with a colonnade of square pillars and a wide shallow flight of steps stands at the centre, its facade stepped back in tiers. Rough boulders the size of small carts have been left where they lie and built around, so the streets bend to accommodate them. Gravel and scree spill down the slope at the town's northern edge, held back by dry-stone retaining walls. A darker, heavier building of unpolished rock crouches to one side, its roof pitched steeply and its entrance a plain rectangular opening. Sparse hardy shrubs grow in stone planters. Behind everything the mountain rises in bare terraced steps where the quarry has eaten into it. The air is dusty and the palette runs grey, slate blue and dull ochre. Only the sky above is bright.