Usu is a coastal city with docks, warehouses, flat-roofed adobe buildings, narrow twisting streets, vivid facades for temple or palace, battlemented walls and towers and an aqueduct running down from the Lebanon Mountains. The new city, Tyre/Sor ("Rocks"), located off the coast on an island made by filling between and around two skerries, has a north-south canal, jetties, breakwaters, multi-storey buildings, guardian walls and a large civic hall. In its Egyptian Harbour, Everard sees beggars, slaves, drinking sailors, a dancing girl, a sweetmeat vendor, a laden donkey, priests of Melqart and Osiris, red-haired Achaeans, a Hebrew warrior, a Philistine dignitary, a black man in leopard skin and ostrich plumes, Phoenician urchins, an Assyrian, an Anatolian and a blond Northern European. Stevedores unload a cargo from Ophir and Sinai. Anderson lists the sounds and smells, both pleasant and unpleasant. We are as close to being there as he can take us.
Poul has few rivals at that sort of vividness.
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ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteI agree! But I recall how, in some of your own stories, Anderson inspired you to write similar descriptions/lists.
Ad astra! Sean