(urth) Seeing the signs...

[Gerry Quinn]

Certainly a steel-framed building, but no evidence of drop ceilings in 
particular!  That's beside the point, anyway.

The table seems like some kind of terrarium - one wonders whether the 
hairless creatures somehow represent humans.  Hard to know, though.

The young-old face of the woman reminds me of Merryn.  Perhaps this is a 
characterisitic of the Witches.

- Gerry Quinn


From: "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
I entered a tower very different from our own. Ours was oppressively
solid, of plates of metal so closely fitted that they had, ages ago,
diffused into one another to become one mass, and the lower floors of
our tower were warm and dripping. Nothing seemed solid in the witches'
tower, and few things were. Much later, Master Palaemon explained to me
that it was far older than most other parts of the Citadel, and had been
built when the design of towers was still little more than the imitation
in inanimate materials of human physiology, so that skeletons of steel
were used to support a fabric of flimsier substances. With the passing
of the centuries, that skeleton had largely corroded away—until at last
the structure it had once stiffened was held up only by the piecemeal
repairs of past generations. Oversized rooms were separated by walls not
much thicker than draperies; no floor was level, and no stair straight;
each banister and railing I touched seemed ready to come off in my hand.
Gnostic designs in white, green, and purple had been chalked on the
walls, but there was little furniture, and the air seemed colder than
that outside. After climbing several stairs and a ladder lashed together
from the unpeeled saplings of some fragrant tree, I was ushered into the
presence of an old woman who sat in the only chair I had yet seen there,
staring through a glass tabletop at what appeared to be an artificial
landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled animals. I gave her my letter
and was led away; but for a moment she had glanced at me, and her face,
like the face of the young-old woman who had brought me to her, has of
course remained graven in my mind.

Does anyone have any interpretations of this description? I'd guess this
building was built in "our" age. With drop ceilings.

But what is the tabletop, and what was it about that face?