The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,158

bill was illustrated: at the top of the page was a fist-sized blot of ink, a butcherous woodcut of a savage black-skinned man with spraying dreadlocks. His throat was clasped in a white lace cravat, his shoulders dignified by good English tailoring. Printed beneath this portrait in crusty letters an inch high was the word

DAPPA

followed by

A SLAVE, property of MR. CHARLES WHITE, ESQ., is missing and presumed stolen or astray. A REWARD in the amount of TEN GUINEAS shall be given to the first party who brings this Neeger to the dwelling of Mr. White on St. James’s Square.

And then finer print, which Dappa would need glasses to read. But he could not get his glasses out of his breast pocket, because not a muscle in his body would move.

Sloop Atalanta, off the Shive

SUNSET

HE WISHED HOOKE WERE HERE. A Natural Philosopher could not but be enthralled by all that was laid out for view by such a rare low tide. The sun had sunk low in the west and, behind London’s dome of smoke, shone the color of a horseshoe when the farrier beats it out on the anvil. That light was skidding across the tidal flats all round, making them seem not so flat at all. The surface of the muck was rippled, as if it were a pond that had been disturbed by a chill wind, then frozen. But more remarkable to Daniel was the shape of Foulness Sand, a few miles to the north, across the mouth of the Thames. This country of muck, larger than some German principalities, lay concealed beneath the water most of the time. It was devoid of any features such as rocks or vegetation. Yet when the tide drew off, the great quantity of water that had been stranded in the dells of all those frozen ripples drained away, not as a streaming sheet, and not by quiet seepage into the earth, but by finding its way to the low places. One hand-sized puddle would erupt in upon its neighbor, and those two would join forces and go looking for a nearby place that lay a hair’s breadth lower, even as every other dollop of water for miles around was pursuing a like strategy. The result, integrated (to use Leibniz’s terminology) over the whole of Foulness Sand, was that entire systems of rivers and tributaries sprang into being. Some of those rivers looked as old as the Thames, and big enough to build cities on; yet in a few hours they’d disappear. Existing in a state of pure alienation, unsoftened by reeds or willows, and not encrusted by the buildings of men, they were pure geometry. Albeit geometry of an irregular and organic cast, repugnant to Euclid or, Daniel suspected, to the silver-haired knight who was standing next to him. But Hooke would have seen beauty and found fascination there, and wrought pictures of it, as he had done with flies and fleas.

“Do the same rivers always spring up? Or is it new ones, in different places, at every tide?” Daniel mused.

“One will recur, again and again, for years, perhaps undergoing slow alterations from tide to tide,” Isaac answered.

“It was a rhetorical question,” Daniel muttered.

“Then some day, perhaps after a storm or an exceptional high tide, the water draws back, and it is gone, never to be seen again. There is much in the subterranean realm that is as opaque to the mind, as it is to the eye.”

Isaac now moved across the poop deck to view Shive Tor. Daniel felt compelled to stay at his elbow.

To their left, gray spread to infinity. Ahead, it extended only to the shore of the Isle of Grain, a couple of miles distant. Most of the isle barely rose above the horizon, but there was one hill, perhaps fifty to a hundred feet above sea level, grassy, with a few weather-shocked trees flinging their arms back aghast. Atop that stood a small, blocky, ancient stone church. It stood broadside to the sea, as if the masons had begun by erecting a wind-wall so that they would have something to stand in the lee of, then topped it with a steep roof to deflect the gales heavenwards. On its western front was a square tower with a flat roof and a crenellated top, which the Black Torrent Guard had pressed into service as a watch-tower.

Between Atalanta and the foot of that hill, the gray expanse was divided into an upper and a lower part by an