# Short sun foreshadowing in Exodus *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 31 Mar 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. --- ### David Wells *31 Mar 2000, 12:16* Have the foreshadowing phrases in the last few pages of Exodus been discussed? During my (perhaps sketchy) flit through the archives I couldn't find anywhere they had, so, in no particular order: 1) [Horn writes, in the first person for almost the first time] "Here I close my defense, having (as I hope) satisfied the demands of my critics" ??? Any ideas what this means ??? 2) [describing Silk] "a man well above average height, with a clear, somewhat pale complexion, bright blue eyes, and straw-colored hair which would never lie flat. A slender man, but not a slow or weak one. He will have a scar upon his back where the needle left it, and may have faint scars on his right arm, left by the beak of the vulture [...]" Hmmm. So why does Horn decide to describe Silk so carefully during the last few words of his epic chronicle(*)? And what is this "not a slow or weak one" business about? Given that the Book of Horn is essentially a religious tract/gospel it may be that he feels motivated to provide believers with a "messiah identikit" to warn them against Silk-pretenders. (It would be ironic if this backfires... It assumes that Silk's spirit doesn't switch bodies. You see what I mean). [Is there a precedent for this in religious/mystical writings, by the way? I.e. "ye shall know him by this..."?] 3) "[Horn speaking] 'He [Sinew] should be home by this time'. [a few sentences later...] something dark flitted between Horn and the whorl that had been his, and he shuddered" This seems to me to be a comparatively clear foreshadowing of a Sinew/inhumu "meeting". 4) Somewhere not long before the end of Exodus (sorry, couldn't find it) Horn comments, I think, that the inhumi are "no more intelligent than dogs". I found this very interesting at the time, because - it seemed to me to suggest that the colonists were in for a hard time. Since we know that Quetzal had managed to reach a senior rank in the Whorl's (curiously Catholic :-) ecclesiastical hierarchy, the wildly-unrealistic prejudice (as I took it at the time) that they were extremely unintelligent seemed to bode poorly for the colonists. - on the other hand it could have been a keen satire on organized religion. Which would have been very amusing. But unlikely given the context... But now this also seems like foreshadowing. (?) Comments? (old) newt (*) I was tempted here to use the word "fable". Hmmm... *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---