# ES Question *The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 28 Jun 2000* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Jim Jordan *28 Jun 2000, 16:26* For you Crowley experts: Dumb me, no doubt, but a mystery left in my mind from Engine Summer is that the people never seem to eat any food and seem to be sustained entirely on St. Bea's Bread smoke. Okay, okay, allusions to marijuana maybe. But as this is an SF tale, something other than magic must be at work. Rush and his buddy seem to last a whole winter with no food, in a trance. I'm sure someone has this figured out. So do me a favor, whydoncha, and lemme in on the answer. Nutria --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *28 Jun 2000, 15:01 · follows Jim Jordan* > For you Crowley experts: > > Dumb me, no doubt, but a mystery left in my mind from Engine Summer is > that the people never seem to eat any food and seem to be sustained > entirely on St. Bea's Bread smoke. Okay, okay, allusions to marijuana > maybe. But as this is an SF tale, something other than magic must be at > work. Rush and his buddy seem to last a whole winter with no food, in a > trance. > I'm sure someone has this figured out. So do me a favor, whydoncha, and > lemme in on the answer. Not that this is a final answer, of course, bfwiw I thought the allusion was to hashish rather than marijuana. And "hash" is the name of a foodstuff, too. As for the sfnal rational, the stuff was brought back by an interstellar probe. Like you said before, mana from heaven. The winter they spent in a trance, that was due to a different substance, wasn't it? (Probably one of the daughters of medicine: those four little pots. One was birth allowance, one was lighten the load, one was near immortality) Because the St. Bea's Bread was something they smoked three or four times a day, no big deal; but that winter in the treehouse was something different for Rush That Speaks, iirc. Go Ask Alice, I think she knows. =mantis= ---