Josserek Approaches Arvanneth

The Winter Of The World, II.

There is always a demand for hides, wool and pickled meat so Josserek wonders:

"(Why didn't the barbarians who wandered northern Andalin take advantage of the market? Travellers said that earth shook beneath the mass of the wild herds yonder.)" (p. 18)

Is this another sign of the Rogaviki's oddness?

Arvanneth, the city described as "Ancient of Ancients," had once had its own port but now is a hundred miles inland because of the sea level drop:

"Now? Whole civilizations had lived, and died, and from their ashes engendered new, while that 'now' lasted." (p. 19)

The so-called Newkeep alone is over three thousand years old. We feel that a city that ancient will have generated an entire literature unto itself and that it deserves a lengthy series rather than a few mentions in a single novel. However, Arvanneth stands for any millennia-old city that has known many empires like Istanbul on Earth or Katandra on Ikrananka in Poul Anderson's Technic History. 

There are maps as frontispieces. (Someone I knew in Lancaster helped Col Buchanan with his Farlander maps.) A ship circumnavigating the globe exits the map to the left/west and re-enters from the right/east which would be impossible on an infinite plain and that raises the question: has any work of fiction been set on an infinite plain? There would be no horizon. Anything could arrive at any time from any distance, different rational species generated by independent evolutionary processes. Maybe also different atmospheric conditions would obtain in regions sufficiently far apart? Has anyone done this?