In the course of my countless journeys through the archipelago, I once encountered an island surrounded by green waters, hexagons of light dancing in the sun. The land was pale in comparison with the litharge of those seas, and with the wings of giant albatrosses sliding across the immaculate sky, the scene would have enchanted any human eye. You could only wonder whether that craggy place was not home to the untouched palace that the diminutive locals, with their fezzes of brick-red felt and stilettos in their cummerbunds, spoke of during the hour of siesta, while you squatted beside a wall and dragged on a shisha. There were, they said, many chambers in the palace, full of unknown wonders, but it was not these that merited risking your life, not these that were worth the trouble, to write a story with a needle in the corner of your eye. Rather, in the center of the palace was the Exit, blocked by a ferocious guardian, whom none could pass. No one had ever vanquished him, and the defeated warriors returned wizened and raw. What was beyond the Exit no one knew, but the angels who occasionally descended to the islands, be it to bless a procession of tear-stained icons, or to rebuke a fool who slept with his wife while she was unclean, or to run various other errands, told of a depth as endless as the ocean floor littered with shattered wooden boats, their holds filled with treasure, and surrounded by fish with pointed beaks, and octopi, and ancient statues of marble flesh.

Any sailor, it was said, might reach that island once in his life, guided by the zodiac charts consulted at his birth. I was thus not surprised that, at the age of fifty – when a man whose skin has been thickened by salt and storms is drawn toward home – it was given to me to place my foot on the burning sands of that storied island. I was not afraid, nor was I pleased: thus it had to be, as I always told myself when facing a new day, a new woman, a new stranger with my knife in his chest. One cannot do anything but what heaven compels. In a man’s last moment, he regards his life and understands: thus it had to be.

I made land on a dinghy, leaving the barque a hundred cubits’ distance from the rocks. The sun was high, I saw no shadow. Fig trees grew wild, full of violet fruits. In the middle of the island was a ring of cliffs, as slim and irregular as a giant’s teeth. With much effort, I found the narrow through which I could penetrate. And there, rising between the rocks, with yellow walls bracing an arched cupola in the shape of a skull, was the palace built by inhuman hands. I entered it as much in search of shade as of adventure, the sun having become blistering, and my clothes and hair were soaked with sweat as though I had swum there. In the vast halls I found shadow, much shadow, thick shadow, of the highest quality.

The palace was immense and deserted, its walls covered with arabesques. In the interior courtyards, fountains lay still, their waters long since evaporated. In their spiral basins, spiders wove dusty cobwebs. The halls were lined with doors; I opened as many as I could. Each led into a chamber with a window facing the sea. Each had a stone cube in its center, where a baffling machinery churned, a golden fish flapped, suspended in a crystal sphere, or a girl sat with her feet hanging, her face sulking at me, like a strange fruit of the sea, wearing a breastplate of rose ivory. Another chamber held a lobster the size of a large dog; it pinched beads of water between its claws and regarded me with blind eyes.

There were more and more halls, but soon I stopped investigating the closed doors, abandoning the surprises that might have been waiting in the chambers behind them, because I was impatient to stand before the Exit. I advanced for hours over the gentle tiles of polished stone. Here and there I passed large, symmetrical openings in the exterior walls, where I saw the sky and sea on every side. Pelicans rested on long ledges, peering inside with one red eye, but not daring to violate the shadow with their flight. Just when I began to lose faith in the stories of the island and to ruminate a return to my ship, I passed through a high arch of porphyry that led into the chamber of the great portal. The chamber was perfectly round, and in its perimeter I counted eleven entrances like this one, buried in the same scarlet stone. The opposite doors could barely be seen across the room’s immensity. I reckoned I was in the palace center, under the skull-like dome visible from the shore, and which, now I marveled, had its hemispheric ceiling painted with the volutes of a brain – the living and mortal throne of the human soul.