The steps of crumbled stairs led up, comprising the corridors with the walls of shabby concrete brightly lit by the fierce spring sun. The steps, the stairwells, the passages, branching off the staircase, everything covered with fine cement dust, as if the building had just been recently built.
Not yet populated and not even brought to the standard state of coziness, typical for the houses inhabited by people. It didn't look like a building inhabited by people. In fact, it was something more similar to a retreat of ghosts, or a place made for conducting some rituals or whatever.
I used the word ghosts that might associate in the minds of most people with gloom, and semi-darkness, and obscurity, and vampires, and werewolves. Well, it wasn't this way though. Because everything basked in the bright, fierce sunlight, and everything looked incredibly real. The concrete walls, the corridors, the window frames without glass. Everything was real and somehow festive. Because of the sunlight. Sunlight makes everything festive. That's why our moods don't depend on the events or objective reality, but only on short surges of hormonal activity that can be pretty much caused by sunlight.
The stairs led to the roof, from which I could see all the surrounding territory. The similar gray ghostly buildings stood around. The same ghostly buildings with the same mysterious and titillating purposes and the dusty road with the trolleys occasionally riding along it.
When you enter the trolley, the initial perception of people riding there would be like, those are mannequins deposited inside just to make the picture complete and preventing the trolley from taking some haunted look, which would lead to a different story. So, yes, the trolleys were filled with people, and if you would've taken a closer look at them, they weren't mannequins at all. Sometimes you would be able even to recognize somebody vaguely familiar.
On the side of the road grew trees - bare, scruffy, and strange. Like some artful installations made of pipe and wire. The road also seemed dusty.
Speaking generally of those places where one could wander for long stretches of time, feeling relaxed and excited at the same time. They all had the same purpose. They were a part of the quest, one that was about learning something important. Like, if you are leafing through the book, and some picture suddenly captures your attention, but you are already through, and you lost this page. And then you spend ages, impatiently and passionately trying to find it.
If you ride in a trolley, it will enter a tunnel at some point. And then you realize that you are, in fact, riding the train. And then the train pulls out from the tunnel, and you find yourself on the bridge. You are somewhat high because you can see the clouds below. It's strange, and you also might feel the prick of another piece of the puzzle coming into place. Eventually, you'll gather them all.
So then there was another tunnel, and then the flash of light again when the train exited the tunnel. Then there was some lake, surrounded by the construction cranes and industrial installations. Plus, its banks were strewn with colorful small houses, their roofs painted with different colors. As if the main goal of their inhabitants was to make the sight more picturesque. Though it was difficult to figure out the general purpose of this place. Like, it contained the elements that didn't align well with each other. Some logic in the composition of elements, comprising the picture, was broken.
Some whiff of memory about the place with a similar level of confusing accumulation of items carried the observer through the convoluted corridors of the Great University. That maze of corridors, big halls filled with incandescent light coming from small light bulbs on the ceiling, where they hung among the web of thick cables. All those passages formed a labyrinth that required extraordinary memory and intuition to navigate.
It was easy to get lost there among the lively crowds of students hurrying about their inexplicable business. There was always a purpose behind any route you might've chosen there, and any wrong turn, in fact, might lead to changing this purpose.