The World and Thorinn

9 How Thorinn tried to cross a river, and found it unlike other rivers.

3892 a.d.:

Having been advised to undertake some unnecessary and intricate study, I chose languages, and for my first attempt selected Lower Southwest Emmish, since my business requires me to visit that sector frequently. At first I found the subject tiring in the extreme, but persevered, and after several months began to acquire some facility. The chief difficulty I found was not in learning the words themselves or their manner of pronunciation, although this included mastering several unaccustomed sounds, but— and this was wholly unexpected— in learning the order in which the words are made into sentences and the ways in which they influence one another. The translator had no rules governing these things in its memory, but at my order was able to deduce and formulate them; this aided me considerably, but many difficulties remained unresolved. To give an example of the simplest kind, where we say, "I intend to take some rest now," the Loswem says (literally translated), "Being at repose this one is to call." At first I believed that there must be some malfunction in the translator, but a second machine gave me identical results,and later I was able to observe that when a Loswem expressed a desire translated as "I intend to take some rest now," this in fact was what he actually said. I commented to a professional acquaintance of mine that I wondered how he could express himself in so illogical and arbitrary a language; he at first pretended not to know what I meant, and when at length I made him understand, by showing how much more clearly and simply we convey the same meaning, he expressed the opinion that it was our language which was illogical and unwieldy. From this I began to suspect that all languages may be almost equally arbitrary and illogical, although some,such as Loswem, are certainly more so than others. In the course of my discussion with my acquaintance, before he tired of the subject, I found that it was impossible to translate the word "intend" into his language at all; when I asked the translator to do it, it replied that it could not do so without the context.

As I advanced in facility I was able to understand more and more of what my Loswem acquaintances said, though not to express myself to them in their tongue: they claimed not to understand me, and could not see the point of making the effort when a translator was at hand. I would have abandoned the undertaking, since several of my acquaintances were beginning to regard me as mentally disturbed, but I felt impelled to continue, though more discreetly, as a consequence of certain discoveries which seemed to me sinister. I discovered, in fine, that in all but the simplest utterances, the Loswem original differed in meaning, sometimes substantially, from the translator's version. This became particularly evident in all discussions concerning religion, local customs, marriage and family life, etc. To give an example of this, in listening to a recorded political conference between our representatives and theirs early in the year just past (in Loswem, obtained while there), I heard the translator say, "We must safeguard our territorial integrity," a familiar Loswem statement, but the speaker in fact had remarked (literally translated), "It requires itself that we others in no way mix our sacred blood," which is an entirely different thing. I found numerous other examples, and the more I pondered over them, the more I came to believe that the political differences between us, which grow daily more exacerbated, aredue to these mistranslations, for which, however, the translators cannot be blamed, since they are inherent in the nature of the two languages: and when this is compounded by the number of separate languages spoken in the world—I believe it is more than three thousand— the situation can only be seen as extremely grave. Yet the solution, if there is one, eludes me. The mobility of modern life requires that we come into constant contact with those who speak other languages, and it would be impossible for all of us to learn each other's tongues; in fact, without the invention and wide use of the translator, modern civilization would be impossible. The problem would be solved if everyone were to learn a single language, but if we cannot even agree with Loswem on the salinity of their efferent water, what chance have we of imposing the simplest and most convenient of all languages— our own, of course— on the whole world with its two hundred billion people?

For a long time he lay hearing the roar of water. Sometimes he lost interest and stopped attending to it, but when he came back again it was always there, distant, muted and not unpleasant. At intervals a large cold drop fell on his face or hand. He did not seem able to turn or cover his face, but this was not alarming, and in fact he forgot about it each time until the next drop reminded him. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but grayness, and closed them again. Presently the world grew lighter beyond his closed lids. He felt there was something he should remember, but could not. He opened his eyes and managed to sit up; he was dizzy and his head hurt. Now he remembered the other time, and he looked around for the box and his other belongings. They were all there, lying beside him on a sloping wet shelf of stone. The air was full of tiny droplets, and the stone was spattered with larger ones that fell now and again; his shirt and breeks were dripping, and he felt damp all over. Before him in the silvery light was a wide gray pool into which a curtain of water descended with a continual roar. The surface of the pool was boiling white; droplets flew and drifted in every direction. Waves surged up unceasingly on the shelf, breaking upon a few bare sticks that lay there. Behind him was a wet wall of rock, hollowed out and overhanging the shelf; what was above that he could not see. A few trailing ferns grew in the crannies of the rock, and there was moss deep in the recess.

When he tried to stand, he found himself so light that he overbalanced at once; his feet floated up while his head and shoulders went down. He tried again, steadying himself against the rock wall this time, and managed to stay up, though his foot on the wet stone had a disposition to drift out from under him. It cost him more effort and several absurdly slow falls to gather up his belongings and hang them about his shoulders. At length it occurred to him to take off his shoes and put them into his belt. Bare toes gave him better footing, and he began to work his way around the recess. As he followed the curve, the recess narrowed and he saw a strip of misty light at the end of the falling water. The rock shelf narrowed here, too, then pinched out altogether. There was nothing for it but to wade in the shallow water, on the submerged stone that was so slippery that he went down instantly in slow motion, floundered up and drifted down again, among white sprays of water that hung unnaturally in the air before they curved over and dripped to the surface again. Individual droplets fell in front of his nose, and he could see them changing shape as they moved—they were not teardrops as he had always supposed, but globes that were constantly deformed this way and that, pulsing and trembling as they fell. Thorinn watched them in amazement, too fascinated to think of getting up until they had all dropped into the water, each leaving its tiny peak and then subsiding among its slow ripples.

He found that the only way he could make any progress at all was to remain on all fours, not even crawling but hitching himself forward with sudden jerks of his arms and knees. Surges of water flung themselves at his face, and he had to close his mouth and eyes until they had struck and dripped slowly away. In this manner he moved forward a few ells, feeling like a drowned worm, until a gravel beach appeared between the cliff and the water. Here he could stand again, and next came a jumble of boulders that was even better. He was wet through, and cold—it was colder here than anywhere he had been in the Underworld, and it struck him now that it might be true after all about the regions of eternal ice at the bottom of the world. As he moved forward, he could see vague shapes in the mist that might have been trunks of slender trees. Remembering his experience with the demons, he went cautiously, pausing often to listen. The boulders decreased in size; bare earth began to appear between them, then a tangle of damp stalks and vines. Out of prudence Thorinn stopped and put his shoes on, but the footing here was almost as bad as in the water, and he had to go on his belly again, gripping the vines to draw himself forward. This was a better way of moving than any he had found yet, and he could have moved faster still were it not that he was alarmed by the way his body floated away from the ground whenever he pulled too vigorously.

Something dark lay athwart his path. Thorinn approached it cautiously and found it was a dead tree-trunk, spongy and half rotten. The peeling bark was reddish-gray, like that of a larch, but it was divided into vertical segments with pointed tops and bottoms. Although he was shivering with cold, Thorinn suppressed the impulse to build a fire. He passed the log and went on up the slope, avoiding the upright shapes—they appeared to be limbless trees, in fact, but the last thing he wanted was to climb a tree whose top was invisible.

The mist thinned as he ascended, and the wall of the cliff came into view again. It was bare reddish-brown rock for the most part, with only an occasional trace of green. Brambles pricked his fingers, and once he heard something small go scurrying off in the ground-cover. Otherwise the world seemed to be empty, and the going was so easy that he covered several hundred ells in a few minutes; but the exercise was not enough to warm him.

The mist had thinned to such an extent that when he stood beneath one of the trees and gazed up, he could see all the way to the top where a spray of branches erupted at last from the straight trunk. He embraced the tree and rose almost without effort, gliding upward with the trunk between his legs; in a few moments, to his elation, he found himself high above the mist. The slope where he had been crawling moments ago was covered with a white blanket, dissolving at the top into trailing wisps. Around him the dark staffs of the trees stood erect and still; beyond them he could see the cataract and hear it, too, better than before. The white band fell straight into the mist, twenty ells away from the rock wall; he followed it upward until his neck cracked, but could not see the top; it was lost in sky-glare and haze. Turning the other way, he looked out over a steeply descending countryside dappled with mist in the hollows. He could see a river emerging from the mist around the cataract; it vanished between two hills, but farther off it reappeared in vast shining loops. A flash of pale brown caught his eye—it was a bird winging slowly away in the distance. Far down the valley, blue with haze, he could see a cluster of spires that looked like the work of men; otherwise, across the whole landscape, there was no sign of life—no movement, no buildings or livestock, not a thread of smoke. He released his hold on the tree and began to drift downward, so slowly that he lost patience and propelled himself faster with his hands. Once on the ground, he began to crawl upslope again. As soon as he had climbed above the mist line, he turned away from the cataract and began to parallel the river. The ground cover was made up of things that looked like vines and grasses but were neither. Some ended in drooping bundles of leaves, like little besoms; others bore tiny purple blossoms. To all appearance it was early spring here, although it had been full summer when he left Hovenskar. How long had he been gone? He put his back against a fallen tree-trunk and began to count on his fingers. He had slept once in the tunnel and three times in the first cavern, the one where he had lost his sword and regained it. In the second cavern he had spent a long time, perhaps as much as twenty days. He had slept once in the treasure cavern, twice while falling down the shaft, once (but probably not long) in the third cavern where the demons had tormented him, then six or seven days in the cavern above that, and once in the engine, and once here. The most he could make of it was thirty-seven days.

"Box," he said, as he unwrapped one of his bundles of food, "how is it that it's spring here but summer in Hovenskar?"

"Here and Hovenskar are two different places."

"I know that. What I mean is—oh, never mind." He took a bite of meat and chewed moodily. In fact, he didn't know what he did mean. Why shouldn't it be spring in one place and summer in another?

"Box, how can I get out of this place?"

"By going through the falling water."

"The waterfall, you mean? Is that how we got in?"

"Yes. There is no other way."

"How do you know that?"

"If there were another way to get out, the engine would not have brought you here. It would have taken you to another place where there was no other way to get out. Therefore in this place there is no other way to get out."

"All right, enough," said Thorinn, and sat awhile in silence. He was puzzled about the box. On certain subjects it seemed perfectly sensible, but on others it could talk nothing but nonsense. It seemed to be saying now that the engine had brought him here to imprison him—but why?

"Box," he said presently, "could you teach me to make an engine that would take me up out of this place?"

"Yes, Thorinn."

In the crystal, a tiny Thorinn stood on a peg that jutted from the cliff face beside the cataract. With a hammer he drove another peg into the cliff above his head, then pulled himself up to stand on it. "What are those pegs made of?" Thorinn asked, leaning closer.

"Of metal."

"Spikes, you mean, then. But where am I to get the metal to forge such spikes? And the hammer to drive them?"

"I don't know." The crystal flickered; now Thorinn was hanging from a huge bladder that drifted through the air just under the sky.

"What is that bladder made of?"

"Leather."

"What makes it float that way?"

"It is full of a gas that is lighter than air."

"But where am I to get such a gas?"

"I don't know." The crystal flickered again, but Thorinn said, "Never mind," and rolled away from the box.

From the crest of the next hill he had a glimpse of the river far below. Instead of trying to walk down the slope, he lay on his belly and began to pull himself downhill with his fingers. In a few moments the trees began to thin out; then they were behind him and he was soaring down into a wide yellow-green valley. The angle of his descent and the pitch of the hillside were so perfectly matched that he found himself floating like a bird just above the grasstops, and it almost seemed that he could go on forever; then the floor of the valley came up, grasses whipped his face, and he was skidding to rest, deep in the wet grass. He climbed the next hill. It was a little warmer on the crest, and why that should be he did not know, for the sky-light gave no heat. The air was mild and still. Below him he could see the river glinting between wooded banks, then another ridge and another, until the landscape was lost in haze. There was something odd about the river, but he could not make it out because of the intervening brush and trees. Thorinn pulled himself down the hill on his belly as before. The trees at the river's edge rose up around him, and now he saw what was peculiar about the river itself—it ran here at such a steep angle that it should have been brawling and leaping, but instead it lay perfectly smooth. Looking at it made him feel dizzy at first, as if he were about to lose his balance. He pulled himself through the tangle of underbrush and stood on the bank. Now he could see one or two faint arrowhead markings where the current ran over snags far out in the river; except for these, he would not have known that the water was moving at all. He dropped a dead leaf in, saw it drift, touch, and move leisurely away. He threw a stone in to see how deep the water was, and raised a white splash almost as high as his head. It slowly collapsed, leaving a ring of irregular drops that followed, and as slowly a central spout grew out of it; then that collapsed too, leaving an unsteady globe, all with dreamlike slowness, while a second ring of pale water began to form around the first, traveling outward as it grew; then a third inside where the central spout had been, and as they traveled sedately after one another, a fourth began. The central globe and the droplets where they fell raised other splashes, not so tall as the first, and from these shallow rings spread out, crossing the bigger ones in a way that made Thorinn dizzy to watch. The first splash had been ragged, but the traveling rings were pure shapes of transparent water, each with a shine of reflected skylight at its lip. They were beautiful, and in their descending heights as they went outward there was a curve that was beauty too. Each wave died away when it reached an invisible circular line an ell or so from the center, and this line was moving outward as well, but not as fast as the waves, so that they continually overtook it and died. And moment by moment the marching waves were less tall, till at last they were only ripples breaking against the river bank, each returning its reflection; then the river was smooth again.

After a time Thorinn threw in another stone and again saw the pause, the sudden leap of water, the crown of droplets twisting and wavering as they slowly fell, the spreading rings like magical moving fortifications. In the tall ring-waves, suspended particles streamed up one side and down the other. The waves kept the same precise distance one from another: how did they do it? Thorinn tried throwing in two stones at once, and saw to his amazement that the water rings passed through each other without resistance, throwing up a rounded peak at each crossing-point, and as the crossing-points moved, the peaks effortlessly moved with them and then disappeared. He had seen all this before, in the spring above Hovenskar, but there the waves had been so shallow and quick that he had never thought how mysterious they were.

A little farther downstream he found a shallow backwater where he stripped and bathed himself. The water leaped around him, stinging cold; afterward, he made a small fire at the water's edge, using bits of the driftwood that was heaped at the bend of the river. The flames curved out, blunt and pale, and although he added more fuel, they never rose much higher; it was as if some of the virtue had gone out of the wood.

A light rain began. He put on his clothes, covered the remains of his smoldering fire, and wandered abstractedly up the river bank, pulling himself along from one sapling to another. Presently the rain stopped and the city came into view, nearer than he had yet seen it, across the next reach of the river. Thorinn climbed a tree to look at it. Perhaps, he thought, the city was inhabited by nocturnal demons, like those who had tormented him in the other cavern, but he doubted it. It was something else: something was wrong. A brown bird passed overhead, almost invisible in the sky-glare. Below, the river was too wide to leap across. Thorinn climbed down and looked at it. Farther upstream the river might be narrow enough to jump, but it would take him too long to find out. He cut a long pole from a sapling and went looking for a log of deadwood.

He found one in a tangle of brush, a bare section of trunk two ells long with a smaller limb projecting at a narrow angle, like a big finger and a little finger. The limb, he thought, would make the log less likely to roll over and would save him the trouble of finding some way to lash two logs together. He dragged it into the shallows where it floated barely out of water; but as the trunk was curved there was a portion of it that stood higher than the rest, and Thorinn stepped aboard there with his pole. The log dipped majestically, lurched, rose again while a wave surged out knee-high all around him. He planted the pole on the bottom and pushed cautiously; the log seemed to move, but in the wrong direction, and Thorinn found himself toppling forward. He straightened up and tried again, and presently found that by leaning back against the pole he could make the log move in the direction he wished. The bottom sloped away until he was using half the length of the pole. Presently the current took him, but he had got the hang of it now—the trick was to keep the log moving against the water, for it was easiest to push when it was moving. With each stroke the forward end of the log rose and dipped, making a tall arrow-shaped wave and scattering a few balls of water the size of his fist that wabbled away bright in the skylight. A breeze sprang up, and gentle wavelets began to march past the log one after another. As the breeze freshened, the waves grew taller and farther apart. Thorinn realized with alarm that the log was already pitching dangerously. Up it went, standing almost upright, then tilted back as the next wave thrust under it. Now each wave had a white crest, and the air was full of water-balls that burst cold against his face. Desperately he kept his balance on the log, knowing that if he fell off he must drown. The pole hampered him and he let it go; the wave swung it back across his chest. It was not a heavy blow, but he realized that he could no longer feel the log with his feet. Half-blinded by spray, he saw the log lifting past him and clutched at it. Then he was in the water, with the slippery dead weight twisting in his arms. His head went under; cold water filled his ears, his nose, his mouth. He struggled, somehow found himself atop again, clutching the limb with one hand and the trunk with the other. He had time for one breath before the log tilted headlong down the next wave, down, down, until he thought it must go over; then he realized with horror that it was going over. The cold water strangled him; he clawed his way out of it up the trunk as it rose to the crest, pitched, began to slide down. Through the pelting drops of spray he had a blurred glimpse of the river and something gray-brown that moved overhead; then he was sliding down the wave again. A cross-wave tilted the log again and he was half in the water, choking. A lurch took them up again. Cold thoughts came into his head: if he let go the log he sank; if he clung to it he drowned. At the top of the surge, he balanced himself desperately atop the log, let go, and leaped away. The river dropped below him, the whitecaps like the tops of spears. He could see the far shore, still a hundred ells distant. Now the river rose toward him again; through the flying spray he saw the log lurch upward, reached, grasped it, swung around with agonizing slowness, and went under. He came up drenched and half-blinded; he balanced himself again somehow on the plunging log and leaped once more, this time at an angle.

Raindrops were descending in long silver chains blown awry by the wind and mingled with the spray. The river rose again below him. The log was gone, and the shore. Now he saw the pebbled beach, but he would fall a dozen ells short of it. Down he went helplessly; the water sprang up over his chin and nose, then his good foot touched something and he leaped up, fighting for breath, down again, and he was in the shallows. He strove against the waves and in a moment staggered up alive onto the wet pebbles. The wind slackened and died; the waves subsided. Presently the river was glassy smooth as before.