Once there was a time when the world looked entirely different.  So different, in fact, that we would recognise neither our houses  nor the streets in which they stand, nor even the cities containing  those streets. Everything was like a blank sheet of paper, a picture  not yet painted, with nothing but the murmur of the wind wandering across it.

This emptiness was one of the Mountain Builder’s favourite  places. He was a connoisseur of emptiness and savoured it like  sweets. He could tell at least fourteen different kinds of it apart,  and knew at least four hundred ways of filling them with extraordinary structures.

On summer evenings, he would sometimes row his little boat  out into the middle of a lake, until the shore had entirely disappeared from view, and listen to the air skimming across the water. The occasional buzzing of insects and gurgling of water often  gave him ideas for new inventions.

The Mountain Builder owed his nickname to the most famous  of his creations: an artificial mountain made of hundreds of  sheets of glass, which could play different melodies depending  on the direction from which the air flowed around it. Yet there  was no object or structure that the Builder could not construct.  He worked in steel and timber, but could also produce genuine  plants, rocks and even streams in his workshop.

Winter found the Builder buried not in snow, but under work.  He had been commissioned to build cities, block by block, street  by street, lamp post by lamp post, and building by building.  The task was as fascinating as it was painstaking accompanied  by the slosh of pouring concrete and the clanging of steel reinforcement. The Builder, however, did not style himself an expert  in structures of every conceivable kind for nothing. To make  the task easier, he constructed a city-building machine bristling  with pipes, cogwheels, belts, cables and chimneys. It swallowed  empty spaces and filled them with a pulsing metropolis, as  though the city were enchanted dough. The machine shuddered  and jolted as it laboured over its construction. The Builder sat  down in an armchair beside it and soon fell asleep. It has long  been known that monotonous sounds lull more than children  to sleep.

Thus spring and summer passed. In autumn, the Builder woke  with a start after dreaming that he had left the city-building  machine switched on. To his horror, he discovered that this was  exactly what he had done. He pressed the button and set off, but  the city seemed endless. Lines of kerbs and the spires of skyscrapers stretched all the way to the horizon. Emptiness had vanished,  thoroughly filled with clamour and blaring car horns. “I may  have overdone those improvements just a little,” he thought,  embarrassed.

As evening fell, out of his workshop rolled a bicycle that  the Builder had converted into an extraordinary wagon laden  with mysterious tools and devices. In the depths of night, while  the inhabitants slept, he would steal into different parts of the city  and turn them back into patches of the old emptiness—into  nature. Flowers and trees sprang up in public squares; concrete  tower blocks became rocks; rivulets and streams welled up from  manholes. Birds made their homes in gutters, while the newly  created flower beds attracted insects of every imaginable species. Before dawn, the wagon would disappear, and people would  delight in their transformed neighbourhoods.

Many years later, someone met the Builder on his way to the edge  of the city and heard this story from him. They passed it on, and  a few days later the wagon was accompanied by a whole procession of residents eager to help him share the city with nature. Those were ancient times, and no photograph survives, since  photography had not been invented yet. What did survive was a map, drawn in pencil on an old sheet of parchment. It still waits  for someone today to set out in the Mountain Builder’s footsteps. This is particularly difficult because the route is not always  marked by a pencil line. To take the first step, you must listen  closely to the music played by the glass mountain…

Amadeusz Nosal