(urth) The Piteous Gate

[Tony Ellis]

Mornings glory wrote:
>while Chris's notion has a certain appeal to it, there is absolutely
>no evidence that the uhlans only selectively enforce the law when
>they feel like it.

Well, there is evidence in the fact that the Piteous Gate is packed with
a multitude of travellers - including experienced wanderers such as Dr
Talos, Baldanders and Jonas. No one expresses any concern at taking this
route out of the city, so clearly most of the time the enforcement is at
least lax enough to allow people to enter and leave unmolested.

I don't think the uhlans are necessarily being selective, however. The
simplest explanation is that there just aren't enough men to patrol 150
miles of open road properly, especially with a war on.


Roy wrote:
>So far as I recall,
>however, Mr. Ellis is in the minority regarding his rather mundane
>explanation. <g> 

I appreciate the smiley, Roy, but the fact is it's precisely because my
explanation is mundane that I think I'm right. I sometimes get the
impression that people feel some sort of inverse Occam's Razor principle
applies to explaining the mysteries in Wolfe's work - that the more
fantastic the theory, the more likely it is to be true. Crabtree's
Bludgeon springs to mind.

If you accept that the soldiers on the far side of the Gate are there to
keep people off the road, why do you need another explanation for the
disturbance that is taking place? A big crowd and a bunch of people
firing at it is all it takes.