Room 285

He made it just in time up on the highest towers’ lightning rod,
just in time to see 70’000 prophets enter the hall
When a starship hit him straight at 1’000’000 mi/s speed.

Room 284

Encroaching
Flinging
Whittled
Bemused
Coarsely
Parish
Bellowing
Eager
Contention
Rabble peasantry
Sectarian jibe
Retaliate, broaden, banter
Chiding way
Welling with pride
A society not riven like this
It has gone astray
Taunt, coalesce
Rabidly
Ribald sectarianism
On the verge of
Outpouring
Tantalising
Surging migration
Beefing up
Electoral lawfare
Newscasters
A skipping-rope scandal
Jock taxes
The circumstances were murky
A contract that will replenish the artillery-shell stocks
Sweden’s bid to join NATO
Turkey had dragged its heels
Disdain for democracy
Like a freight train
He chalked up another win
A flare-up in violence that has swept the country
The prime minister invoked the powers
The government will appeal against the ruling
The country’s lèse-majesté laws
They had pledged to build the temple
A corruption scandal that has engulfed the normally squeaky-clean government
He’s been charged with 27 offences
Iranian proxies in Iraq
A volley of ballistic missiles was fired
A bid to counter Russia’s growing influence
Countries battling jihadists
Wagner mercenary group
Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia
It was able to communicate with the probe
The rout in tech shares
The NASDAQ is being propelled by the turnaround in stocks
The Nikkei is scaling new peaks
Utterly locked
They are dropping to a five-year low
It has dropped since the beginning of the year
He ordered authorities to take forceful steps
Speculations mounted
Its yield-curve control strategy
Government-bond yields rose sharply
They cleared the path
The aircraft were grounded
A motion brought by activists
It does not comply with the rules
Pushing it further ahead of rival services
Crackdown
A 30% jump in annual sales
Top-end semiconductors
Tesla’s revenue grew by 3%
Demand may be waning
He forecast
He has been less bullish than his peers
A buyout offer
It is laying off
A watchdog fined Amazon
Irritable-bowel syndrome
The emerging world
To be haunted
A level playing-field
It could shrink gaps
White-collar workers
IMF
They have long been held back
They are ill-equipped for the struggle
The briefing sets out
Policymakers
To apply for government loans
It will be tweaking
Pleasingly
Worldwide
This is fed into AIs
It can be tailored to local needs
To fine-tune
A whizzy service
The idea is taking off
A narrower set of capabilities
Bespoke datets
China’s prowess
India’s outsourcing industry could be disrupted
It’s well-placed to innovate
Countries of the Gulf
To lower language barriers
It will not dislodge America’s crown
Plenty could go wrong
To gather and store data
Sub-Saharan Africa
To seize the opportunity
This mismatch
Pent-up demand
Some of the blame lies squarely
A deterrent
Predictably
Lest his own side turns on him
They want to raise the threshold
The courts are overstuffed with cases
The backlog of cases
There ought to be a deal
Vietnam’s ailing leader
Trepidation
Coastline
Both are courting it
State visits
An adroit balancing act
Earthquake
Less pilfering of intellectual property
A share of GDP
40 years of opening
Foreign direct investment
It ditched collectivism
People were starving
Annual income per person has since grown six-fold
Trade and investment have soared
Aftermath
Missteps
The demography underlying its growth is weakening
The sacking of the country’s president
They fret over a future
It could grind to a halt
It’s not up for review
A step towards the real thing
He should step aside
A niche corner
Having grabbed prestige from banks
$12trn of Assets
Private-equity firms, as Blackstone
The company’s ebullient
Lifeless
They have cast doubts on the value
Willingness
The industry is swallowing up life insurers
They are prized for their balance-sheets
Payouts
Knowledgeably
To some degree
Labyrinthine interlinkages
More than a whiff of regulatory arbitrage
To ensure that the safety-buffers are adequate
To ignore either edge of the sword
She has routinely been dubbed a neo-fascist
Owing to fears
A wrecker, a backsliding
A thorn in the flesh
It has shrunk back to 1.5 percentage points
The markets show no sign of jitters
His autocratic spots
All in all
Run-of-the-mill conservatives
That does not mean everything is sunny in the country
It would bolster the power of the prime minister
Systemic
A windfall tax
That will fall on deaf ears

Room 283

In room 283, which is a vast hall lit in candlelight, everybody wears a wig. Sparse bagatelle tables attract little, bored crowds; valets carry silver trays of tiny pastries and glasses of sweet, straw-colored wine; only the sparse sounds of the indolent games, like diminutive wooden notes, are heard.
So, the queen is crazy, whispers someone. Oh, don’t be a boor, replies someone else a couple tables away, in a soft, condescending voice: She’s just a character. A queer one, softly giggles someone else. A quite queer one, an old gentleman quietly says while throwing a ball straight to the hole granting the biggest prize; Our quite queer but overly good mother & overseer. A toast to the queen!, says in a full voice a young man in a wig that goes down to his feet.
And so they toast. In that moment, a young lady is heard wispering that she had a dream. Nobody seems to listen to her in the general glass-rising (dreams: how boring! toasts: how bracing!); but when she adds A dream of a purple room, silence falls in the hall like the heaviest of drapes. Some (among the youngest gentlemen) turn to her; most of the others do not, liking better to look at the floor in a studied embarassment. A valet relights a candle that had gone out.

Room 282

The white altar in the room has been set up with a spiral of ash for a rite timed for midnight, which will be in ten minutes. Between the rough slab of marble and the wall facing north there is a hyacinth in a pot, for Earth. Towards the wall facing south, a red candle: Fire. East: an bowl of Water. West: a glyph in silver on a white parchment (Air). Seven minutes to midnight now. Five minutes, and nobody is showing. Chamber music is heard from some other room; laughs and chatter under it. Three minutes: nobody. Two minutes; one… It has been like this for a while now… Every time…

Room 281

Vishnu lies languid in a lake of milk; Laksmi, walking softly over lotus petals, smiles to him, a smile creating universes, which collapse after æons at its end; he looks at his fair spouse & double and says:
“Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded
                                                            catolithismo
                      y muy poco reliHion. 
Yo creo que los reyes desparecen.”
(Kings will, I think, disappear).
What about gods, honey?, she says, her universal form now displaying some housemaid holding a smoking pie, and he starts laughing, and she starts too, and many things are shattered.
What thou lovest well remains,
                                                  the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
                                            or is it of none?

Room 280

Room 280, which (the sources often take care to point out) is now located in another country, is the only room of its building and it’s balanced, symmetrical, regular, simple, sober, predictable, motionless, coherent and definite. Such a thing suggested to some scholars the idea of an instable, asymmetrical, irregular, complex, excessive, unpredictable, dynamic, incoherent and distorted room somewhere – or, to be precise, of a building full of such rooms. This idea was once a serious taboo, whose expression would lead to heavy sanctions on the affluent & crippling punishments on the pauper; now it’s just considered in quite poor taste to say it publicly.

Room 279

Room 279 is like a crypt,
a place for burials in stone,
but windows abound & inscryptions too:
“He died in battle yet is now buried in a cask of feathers.”
“A pharaoh had himself mummified in honey, and was already eaten after three decades.”
“While losing her life she thought it was just like losing a grain of sand.”
“…others asked for soma in point of death…”,
“…but the real wisdom is to never be born.”
“AHOOGA AHOOGA!”
“Patlamduri qatapulti, ondigera sarasrupti.”
“The people of those far countries had gods so weak they needed to promise prizes to the believer & punishments to the unfaithful; one was so feeble he ordered to destroy the images of predecessors long time dead; and one such a gaffer he ended up killing himself.”
“A man with a visible sickness in the [canceled part] is unfit for sacrifice. There he is, looking at the cart with the chosen heading to the labyrinth.”
“A saint makes no projects.”
“To tell apart the sky from the earth is the peak of knowledge.”
“♤♡◇♧”
“☆|<>39₩““~~GLGOF”
“_.”