(urth) Wall of Nessus

[Josh Caswell]

I wonder if anything can be taken from what we see with Baldanders
(separate and together with) and the other giants of the sea.  Perhaps it is
an issue of growth, both of size and power; the walls may have once been
thought to have been enough or maybe it was known that they were only a
minor or more correctly temporary dissuasion to those from the sea.

Of course it also seemed to me that Jonas, while more knowledgeable than
Severian, was also still much in the dark on the exact root cause of the
construction of the wall.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Mr Thalassocrat
<thalassocrat08 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>
>> Despite my recent musings about when and why the Wall of Nessus may have
>> been built, upon further reflection I think I can establish from the text
>> that it antedates both the autarchy and Typhon.
>>
>> Jonas came from an earlier time period and knew far more than Severian
>> about
>> the past. Sev questioned him, when they were in Saltus, about the strange,
>> man-like creatures they had seen when they passed through the Wall. He
>> asked: "When we were going through the Wall, you said the things we saw in
>> there were soldiers, and you implied they had been stationed there to
>> resist
>> Abaia and the others." (CLAW, chap. VIII)
>>
>> Sev wanted to know if the man-apes he saw in the mine were also hybrids
>> like
>> those in the Wall and why the autarchs had not used human soldiers. There
>> follows some debate about that, but it is not germane to my point. Jonas
>> said: "The old autarchs, who were not autarchs or called so, did use human
>> soldiers. But the warriors they had created by humanizing animals, and
>> perhaps, in secret by bestializing men, were more loyal. They had to be,
>> since the populace - who hated their rulers - hated these inhuman
>> servitors
>> more still. Thus the servitors could be made to endure things that human
>> soldiers would not. That may have been why they were used in the Wall. Or
>> there may be some other explanation entirely."
>>
>> Regardless of why hybrids were used in the Wall rather than humans, the
>> point is that rulers (plural), before the autarchy, stationed defenders in
>> the Wall. Typhon was the last ruler before the first autarch, Ymar, and
>> those two were contemporaries. So, if Jonas is to be believed, the Wall
>> was
>> there before Typhon. That section of text also strongly suggests that the
>> purpose of the Wall was to resist the mountain-sized monsters in the
>> oceans.
>>
>>
> But isn't that contradicted a little later in the same scene? IIRC, Sev
> points out the walls aren't going to be much use against creatures the size
> of Abaia, and Jonas agrees, indicating that the walls are actually for
> defense against Abaia et al's human followers.
>
>
>
>> That latter detail may be somewhat at odds with Cyriaca's story, and after
>> Typhon was revived on the mountain he speaks as if the monsters in the
>> oceans were news to him ("There are powers in the seas now who would
>> rule."
>> [SWORD, chap. XXVI] ), but that's the way it goes.
>>
> That "... in the seas *now* ..." is an annoying little itch. Of course, in
> UOTNS and the susbequent cycle volumes, Abaia etc infest the seas in
> Typhon's day.
>
>
>
>
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