But you laugh as though you actually liked the sight of the black houses and the gray snow and the silent people." "How can a place be melancholy?
The seat of melancholy is the liver.
Imagine a city with a liver--of brick and mortar, or stone and cement, a huge mass of masonry buried in its centre, like an enormous fetish, exercising a mysterious influence over the city's health--then you may imagine a city as suffering from melancholy." "How absurd!" "My dear boy, I rarely say absurd things," answered Keyork imperturbably.

"Besides, as a matter of fact, there is nothing absurd.
But you suggested rather a fantastic idea to my imagination.

The brick liver is not a bad conception.

Far down in the bowels of the earth, in a black cavern hollowed beneath the lowest foundations of the oldest church, the brick liver was built by the cunning magicians of old, to last for ever, to purify the city's blood, to regulate the city's life, and in a measure to control its destinies by means of its passions.

A few wise men have handed down the knowledge of the brick liver to each other from generation to generation, but the rest of the inhabitants are ignorant of its existence.