(urth) Wall of Nessus

[Ryan Dunn]

Mmm. A sooty drumstick sounds delicious. So does an ice cream drumstick.

Sorry to bounce back for a moment here, but...

I've always felt the wall, as described in UotNS, was quite implausible as well.

Using UotNS's quote as canon, Wall of Nessus = 9 miles high by 9,000 miles long.

The stratosphere is about 12 miles up. So 9 miles up is consistent with birds not being able to fly over it (highest bird flight on Earth was a vulture recorded at 7 miles up), but makes for a really hard sell visually.

Also, at 9,000 miles in length, if the Wall were unwrapped it would encompass more than 1/3 of our Earth at the equator.

Another reference... the entirety of Texas's border equals only 3,800 miles.

And here's the quote, which was referenced earlier...

"...just as that smallest and uppermost sail was an entire continent of silver, compared to which the mighty Wall of Nessus, a few leagues in height and a few thousand long, might have been the tumbledown fence of a sheepfold..." (Urth of the New Sun, Chap. XIV "The End of the Universe")

...ryan



On Jun 15, 2010, at 11:38 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:

> On 6/15/2010 1:42 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>> Then again , there are some number of hungry folk who come into possession of energy weapons in the course of any number of wars,
>> 
>> There's more than one war?
> 
> Between the Age of Myth and Severian's time? Probably at least 2-3.
> 
>>> and their line-of-sight range may indeed make high flight a survival liability.
>> 
>> I don't think high flight would ever be a liability for waterfowl.  It just wouldn't help anywhere near as much against energy weapons as against bows.
> 
> It's the same math as the wall's height vs sight distance; the higher they fly, the more acres of hungry infantrymen, impoverished dimarchi, or mounted dwarves can draw a bead on them.
> 
>> It's not clear to me that the poor could recharge ex-military energy weapons enough to use for much hunting, or that the weapons would leave much edible meat on a bird.
> 
> There seem to be any number of places where still-running machinery indicates the presence of electrical power, assuming the weapons require it. Meanwhile, the low edible yield encourages more to be killed to produce a given amount of food, and even a sooty drumstick is a feast to someone who hasn't eaten in days. Besides, they might be anpiels posing as geese while spying for the enemy.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
> < http://ieeetamut.org >
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