Pir Panjal

SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), p. 114.

Two paragraphs, too long to quote in full, are a beautiful descriptive passage and also pure Poul Anderson. Either SM Stirling was influenced by what I call Anderson's "description lists" or he independently developed this technique.

Athelstane King, returning home, sees:

the house with its wings and annexes;
the grounds with their barns, stables and workshops;
Kingsby village with its dwellings, shops and other buildings including four kinds of places of worship;
the Pir Panjal range beyond (see image).

(Four kinds of worship? OK, this is British India so there is a church, a mandir, a mosque and a gurdwara. I would say that these four buildings represent two interacting traditions, prophetic and contemplative, but that's me commenting so let's return to the text.)

Having listed the buildings in Kingsby, Stirling, again in a style similar to Anderson's, colorfully describes the mountain range: blue, crimson, gold, white and pale rose. I had to reread the concluding sentence carefully - "rose" is not a verb but a noun incorporated into the adjectival phrase, "pale rose." Read with appropriate attention, the last two sentences describe the entire mountain range from blue cedars up to "...sun-splashed snow." 

Returning to the opening section of Chapter Seven - in the previous post I summarized an account of the Analytic Engine but omitted its sounds:

clattering of inputted instruction cards;
clicking and ticking of brushes reading the gaps;
barking of orders by supervisors;
"...groaning, querning rumble of metal..." (p. 102);
the sound of the fans needed for ventilation;
"...rattle of rail carts..." (ibid.);
the rumble of the water that powers the turbines.

That this massive Engine is a purely mechanical, pre-electronic computer is emphasized by the old-fashioned garb of its supervisors: "...black coats and tall stovepipe hats..." (p. 101) Could the course of history really have been that different? So far, the novel has two distinct fictional premises: the Fall and a psychic ability exploited by the Empire's enemies.