The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau Page B

along the river after he’d finished working. He stayed away from the east end, where the generator was; he didn’t want to think about the generator. Instead, he went the other way, toward the place where the river rushed out of the Pipeworks. The path grew less level at this end, and less smooth. The river here was bordered with clumps of wrinkled rock that seemed to grow out of the ground like fungus. Doon liked to sit on these clumps, running his fingers along the strange creases and crevices that must have been carved somehow by running or dripping water. In some places there were grooves that looked almost like writing.
    But as for things of importance, Doon found none. It seemed that the Pipeworks was no use after all to a person who wanted to save the city. The generator was hopeless. He would never understand electricity. He used to think he could use electricity to invent a movable light, if he studied hard enough. He took apart light bulbs; he took apart the electric outlets on the wall to see how the wires inside wound together and in the process, got a painful, vibrating jolt all through his body. But when he tried to wind wires of his own together in exactly the same way, nothing happened. It was what came
through
the wires that made the light, he finally understood, and he had no idea what that was.
    Now he could see only two courses of action: he could give up and do nothing, or he could start to work on a different kind of movable light.
    Doon didn’t want to give up. So on his day off one Thursday, he went to the Ember Library to look up fire.
    The library occupied an entire building on one side of Bilbollio Square. Its door was at the end of a short passage in the middle of the building. Doon went down the passage, pushed open the door, and walked in. No one was there except for the librarian, ancient Edward Pocket, who sat behind his desk writing something with a tiny pencil clutched in his gnarled hand. The library had two big rooms, one for fiction, which was stories people made up out of their imaginations, and the other for fact, which was information about the real world. The walls of both rooms were lined with shelves, and on most of the shelves were hundreds of packets of pages. Each packet was held together with stout loops of string. The packets leaned against each other at angles and lay in untidy stacks. Some were thick, and some were so slim that only a clip was needed to hold them together. The pages of the oldest packets were yellowed and warped, and their edges were uneven rows of ripples.
    These were the books of Ember, written over the years by its citizens. They contained in their close-written pages much that was imagined and everything that was known.
    Edward Pocket looked up and nodded briefly at Doon, one of his most frequent visitors. Doon nodded back. He went into the fact room, to the section of shelves labeled “F.” The books were arranged by subject, but even so, it wasn’t easy to find what you wanted. A book about moths, for instance, might be under “M” for moths, or “I” for insects, or “B” for bugs. It might even be under “F” for flying things. Usually you had to browse through the entire library to make sure you’d found all the books on one subject. But since he was looking for “fire,” he thought he might as well start with “F.”
    Fire was rare in Ember. When there was a fire, it was because there had been an accident—someone had left a dishtowel too close to an electric burner on a stove, or a cord had frayed and a spark had flown out and ignited curtains. Then the citizens would rush in with buckets of water, and the fire was quickly drowned. But it was, of course, possible to start a fire on purpose. You could hold a sliver of wood to the stove burner until it burst into flame, and then for a moment it would flare brightly, giving off orange light.
    The trick was to find a way to make the light last. If you had a light that would keep