# How big is the whorl? *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 27 Nov 1996* > 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. --- ### Ranjit Bhatnagar *27 Nov 1996, 15:29* Some clues: when Sand and Hammerstone are talking to Silk about soldiers and the Plan of Pas in the tunnels, they mention something like a couple hundred cities, and about half a million people in Viron. If we take that to mean 200 cities with half a million each, that's a hundred million people... roughly comparable to the population of Japan (125 million), whose land area is 375,000 square kilometers/15000 sq mi, about the size of California. It's often implied that there's a lot of unpopulated, wild space between cities, so the cities are probably more evenly distributed in size and location than cities in Japan or California. Could the Whorl be about the size of California rolled up into a tube? When Silk was lying woozy on Blood's roof, having been whacked by the White-Headed One, he saw a flier flying "three-score leages" (289 km/179 mi) beneath (above) him. That sounds unlikely, though -- who could see a small person 179 miles away? You can't see people from 5 miles up in an airplane. Maybe whorlish leagues are a lot smaller, or the narrator was exaggerating because Silk was so out of it. Whorl Web: http://moonmilk.volcano.org/whorl/ Questions or problems to whorl-owner at lists.best.com ---