(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/2/2011 6:39 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Gyoll flows roughly south to the west coast of the continent.  At the climatic scene on the beach when Severian takes his boots off (CotA, Ch. XXXI), "Land--Nessus, the House Absolute, and all the rest--lay to the east; west lay the sea."  And that's near the mouth of Gyoll, as I recall.
>   
> On the other hand, Severian remembers when he's in the mountains that Master Palaemon had told him a pestilential "coastal jungle" lay to the west (SotL XXIII).  It doesn't sound like the mountains are so far east that we're in a mirror image of South America.


That's it---thanks! But it sounds to me exactly like a mirror image of 
South America.

The Andes are not all in Chile and Peru. There is a mountaintop in 
northern Argentina where children were ritually exposed and stayed 
frozen for a few thousand years. Near Salta, I believe (Saltus).
>   
> The Commonwealth is clearly in the southern hemisphere, and there are far more suggestions of South America than of Africa or Australasia, but I don't think we're supposed to connect it with the real present-day South America, still less connect the mountains with the Andes or Nessus with Buenos Aires.



Possibly. And yet, it's so obvious, how can we NOT connect it? 
Therefore, how can it not have been intended?