Roche

Roy C. Lackey · 18 Sep 2006, 05:12 · from 2006-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:12:06 -0500
Subject: (urth) Roche
Message-ID: <001601c6dae0$fefd9940$b53ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

JWillard wrote:
>Where I put you, there you lie,
>Never let a stranger spy,
>Like glass grow to any eye,
>Not of me.
>
>Here be safe, never leave it,
>Should a hand come, deceive it,
>Let strange eyes not believe it,
>Till I see."
>
>This bit's always nagged at me, and I think this is why: It almost
>sounds like a hypnotic chant.  A chrisos=gold=sun is hidden then
>protected by this incantation: as the sun in Sev is hidden by some kind
>of post-hypnosis?  So he doesn't see, or others?  Either way, this
>passage has always seemed extra important, and this is all that makes
>sense to me.

I don't really have much to add except to point out that when the
incantation is repeated near the end of CITADEL, "glass" has been replaced
with "grass". I don't know if it is a typo, or an error by Wolfe or
Severian. That and, of course, the hidden coin is false gold. Why would
Vodalus have been carrying a counterfeit coin?

-Roy

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