The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,46

the right times, Daniel was able to cause his parcels to be loaded on a boat; passage to be booked across and down the river; and the carter to be sent home.

Seen from Thames Street the river had seemed less Conduit than Barrier—a palisade of honed wood thrown up to prevent an invasion, or an escape. But with a few strokes of the waterman’s oar they penetrated the screen along the wharves and surged out into the main channel. This was as crowded as any water in the world, but miraculously open and accommodating compared to the streets of London. Daniel felt as though burdens had been lifted, though nothing could be further from the truth. London very quickly became a smouldering membrane, a reeking tarpaulin flung over the hill and not smoothed out. The only features of consequence were the Fire Monument, the Bridge, the Tower, and St. Paul’s. The Bridge, as always, seemed like a Bad Idea, a city on stilts, and a very old, slumping, inflammable Tudor city at that. Not far from its northern end was the Fire Monument, of which Daniel was now getting his first clear view. It was an immense solitary column put up by Hooke but universally attributed to Wren. During Daniel’s recent movements about London he had been startled, from time to time, to spy the lantern at its top peering down at him from over the top of a building—just as he had often felt, when he was a younger man, that the living Hooke was watching him through a microscope.

The tide was flowing, and it wafted them downstream at a fair clip. They were abreast of the Tower before he knew it. With some effort of will, Daniel swerved his gaze from Traitor’s Gate, and wrenched his thoughts from recollection of old events, and paid heed to present concerns. Though he could not see through the Tower’s walls and bastions, he could see smoke rising from the general vicinity of the Mint buildings; and beneath the general clamor radiating from the city he phant’sied he could detect the slow heavy pulse of the trip-hammers beating out guineas. On the battlements were soldiers, wearing black trim on their red coats: therefore, the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who had been garrisoned at the Tower, yanked away from it, re-garrisoned there, yanked back again so many times that Daniel had given up trying to keep track. The whereabouts of the Black Torrent Guard were an infallible weather-cock that told which way the wind was blowing, where Marlborough—who had founded the regiment—was concerned. If the United Kingdom was at war, the Black Torrent Guards were at the front. If at peace, and Marlborough in favor with the Sovereign, they would be at Whitehall. If Marlborough lay under suspicion of being another Cromwell-in-the-making, then his favored Regiment would be exiled to the Tower, and numbed with the toils of minding Mint and Arsenal.

As they drifted down the river, the buildings gradually became meaner, and the ships more magnificent. Not that the buildings were so very mean at first. Carriageways had always coursed along both banks, but now one could not see them because warehouses, mostly of burnt brick, had been cast up between them and the river, their walls plunging sheer into the water so that boats could bump against them to be loaded or unloaded with the help of cranes that projected out above the water like the feelers of microscopic animalcules. The only relief in these warehouse-walls was at small flat wharves specializing in this or that type of cargo, and connected to the world by rays of pounded dirt. On the left or Wapping bank, those streets led into a city that had, dumbfoundingly, been summoned into being during Daniel’s absence. On the right or Southwark bank, the buildings soon dwindled to a mere screen along the water-front, with open country beyond. But Daniel was only allowed to see into it when the boat swam into transitory alignment with a south-going road. Such roads were lined with new buildings for a quarter-mile or so inland, making them look like sword-cuts hacked into the city. And the country beyond was not your English farmsteads (though there were pastures and dairies) but your quasi-industrial landscape of tenter-grounds and tanner yards, the inherently land-hungry manufactures of large flat goods.

Coming round the elbow before Wapping put them in view of a mile of river, running straight up to the great horseshoe-bend between Limehouse and