"She looked up toward the sky, where the Great Bear wheeled and Andromeda's nebula was a tiny whorl of silver impossibly far away and the Galactic belt's clustered suns ran like a pale river between the constellations." (p. 57)
I quote this passage because it is yet another description of the Milky Way that I seem to have missed before.
This chapter nearly concludes with another familiar theme:
"That night we slept on pine boughs with the wind talking in the trees overhead." (p. 59)
What did the wind talk about?
This has been an interlude. The text must return to the action. The very last sentence of the chapter reads:
"Our interlude was ended, and we started out next day for the new capital of North America." (ibid.)
Addendum: I had not missed that description of the Milky Way. It is here.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think good action/adventure stories SHOULD have quiet "interludes," to allow readers to kind of catch up with the story and maybe give some thought to it's meaning.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that light pollution making the stars less visible was far, far less common when Poul was growing up. And he spent a fair amount of time in really deep-rural locations as a boy.
A lot of people these days don't realize how -bright- the night sky can be in clear weather with no artificial lighting anywhere near.
I remember being struck by that on trips into the countryside in Kenya, when I was younger.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I noticed that myself, during my visits to Maui, HI--how bright, clear, and STARRY the night time skies were.
Incidentally, the Vatican Observatory removed its telescopic researches from Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills south of Rome to a new location in AZ, because artificial light from Romew was making such work difficult.
Ad astra! Sean
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