"The stream wound like a somnolent snake through the myriad blues of jungle. 'We call it the Golden River in spite of its being silt-brown. Auriferous sands, you see, washed down from the mountains.'"
-CHAPTER THIRTEEN, p. 287.
"Northward wound the Golden River, frozen and snowed on and frozen again until it was no more than a blue-shadowed valley among the bluffs."
-CHAPTER SIXTEEN, p. 322.
Like a completely different place. The Merseians bestow the name, "Golden River." The viewpoint of the second quotation is Ruadrath and that species does not distinguish between "...place names, possessives, and eponyms..." (p. 321)
- so this passages applies the name for the reader's benefit.
The shelflands have "...a brief florescence, an aftermath of summer's fierce fertility." (ibid.) We recently quoted God referring to the creations and their brief efflorescences. See Vaster Spaces.
Rrinn of Wirrda's has two experiences that we cannot. First, he meets a female and they remember that they are husband and wife. Secondly, enraged to find an intruder in Wirrda's storehouse, Rrinn recognizes that it is not a Merseian because it is too erect, has no tail and has yellow-brown skin partly covered by hair....
Flandry has survived his escape from the Merseians. (We remember a Didonian in the opening section of The Rebel Worlds trying to remember whether the strangers had beaks.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
If Ruadrath don't distinugish "...place names, possessives, and eponyms..." how should we understand "Rrinn of Wirrda's"? Rrinn seems to be somehow a "possessive" of Wirrda's, whoever or whatever it was. I've thought of "Wirrda" as being the name of Rrinn's tribe. Was Wirrda an ancestor of the tribe? It doesn't seem to be a place name.
Here, again, we see Anderson striving to give us plausible speculations on how DIFFERENT we should expect non-humans will be compared to humans.
Ad astra! Sean
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