The Green Hills of Morok

Morok. Smoking Morok. More, smoking more -- broken, coronary crowns of smoke. For Tamar the smoke is a portal.  As it obscures the walls, the escutcheons and fleurs de lis of the wallpaper, hides the grate from which a feeble heat is rising, the lamps, even the antediluvial wardrobes of the Pensión Madrid, the tired fumes bring to light a passage into a broken, imperial element, the element of Morok. Who could map the place that the exhausted clouds reveal?  Who could trace its streets, its cobblestones made of a single human hair, to their origin, a beginning commanded and inscribed in the Book of Alacla which takes root inside Tamar's smallest fingernail?  Is it ... could it have been that despite every escape, despite the systematic journeys beyond all systems, her farthest imaginable goal could only be the street outside this cold window that is now befogged with her obsessions?  Might it someday have been true that no matter how far she ran, how many forests she bu