Vestibules, stairways, loggias, corridors of the palace have high, vaulted ceilings; every footstep, every click of a lock, ever sneeze echoes, rebounds, is propagated horizontally along a suite of communicating rooms, halls, colonnades, service entries, and also vertically, through stairwells, cavities, skylights, conduits, flues, the shafts of dumbwaiters; and all the acoustical routes converge on the throne room. Into the great lake of silence where you are floating rivers of empty air, stirred by intermittent vibrations. Alert, intent, you intercept them and decipher them. The palace is all whorls, lobes; it is a great ear, whose anatomy and architecture trade names and functions; pavilions, ducts, shells, labyrinths. You are crouched at the bottom, in the innermost zone of the palace-ear, of your own ear; the palace is the ear of the king.

Italo Calvino. The King Listens - (Under the Jaguar Sun).