Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,152

it was, for adamant did not alter its form unless he caused it to do so. The Land had been fully circumscribed and was enclosed. Satisfied of this, he turned his course inland and began tracing the river back to where he had started. Because of its many branchings this might have been a difficult task, were it not for the fact that the way he had followed from the park to the ocean was a carpet of red forest. To its left and to its right was bare adamant, veined with rivers but bare of trees or any other living stuff.

He might easily have brought more trees into being and covered the bare places with red beauty, but his sojourn along the coast had awakened in him a taste for variety, and he was beginning to see wrongness in all of the trees’ being of the same kind. More perfect would have been a world in which trees of diverse kinds grew on the hills and in the valleys. On an impulse he flew up one rocky vale that carried a tributary of unusual size. Such a great stream, he reckoned, must spring from a correspondingly great place. He followed it uphill for a time until he came to a place of immense rocks protruding from the ground, which he knew to be mountains. On their slopes he made new sorts of trees that were forever green, a darker green than that of the trees in the park. As he flew low over this new forest to inspect it, a new sensation came to him: this forest had a fragrance that spoke to him, somehow, of such forests in the place he had abided before he had died. He breathed it in deep, and knew that his face, still unseen, had affordances for drawing in the wind and smelling what it was made of.

After a few turns around those mountains he followed the great tributary back down to the main channel of the river and doubled back along the course that would lead him up through the red forest to the top of his hill. This too had a fragrance now, less strong than that of the dark green forests in the mountains, but nonetheless pleasing.

He alit in the park to find all little different from how it had been when he had departed, save that many more leaves had fallen to the ground, and some had become dry and begun to scuttle about in the wind. In many of these he sensed the inchoate tangles of rude perception that he identified as souls. Walking up and down the street, strolling in the park, and ranging through the forest in the next few days he counted perhaps ten times ten of them. Their presence no longer troubled him as it had at first. Yet he felt that the time had arrived for him to make some place into which they could not go, so that, when he so chose, he could be alone as he had been used to during the first eons since he had died.

In the beginning the park had been flat. Later he had changed the shape of it and made it into a hill. Now he changed its shape again, causing the adamant that lay beneath the grass to grow up out of it in places, forming walls. Just as he had earlier bounded the whole Land with a coast to separate it from the ocean, he now bounded the top of the hill with a wall. But whereas the coast’s beauty had derived from its roughness, he sensed that a proper wall should be smooth and straight. He made it thus, pushing it back in some places and drawing it out in others, until the walls had acquired a pleasing uniformity. On the side that looked toward the street he created an aperture. As he had come to expect, the name of it came to him presently: gate. And in the opposite wall, the one that looked toward the forest, he created a smaller gate.

A considerable stretch of park still lay between the small gate and the forest. He bounded this too, not with walls but with hedges of trees whose nature he altered so that they put forth many branches dense with small leaves that never turned red or fell, so that in all seasons a wall of green would enclose this area. Its name was Garden. He spent many days there brooding