Wall of Nessus

Mr Thalassocrat · 15 Jun 2010, 01:38 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: thalassocrat08 at gmail.com (Mr Thalassocrat)
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:08:44 +0930
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
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On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> On 6/14/2010 8:35 AM, James Wynn wrote:
>
>> Someone recently mentioned this quote by Severian:
>>
>> "No. I've spent my life so near the middle of the city that the Wall was
>> no more than a dark line on the northern horizon when we looked from the
>> glass-roofed room at the top of our tower. I am astounded, I admit."
>> SHADOW XXXV
>>
>> What would the radius of the city need to be for a wall of that height
>> to disappear beyond the horizon at ground level?
>>
>
> There's a distance-to-horizon calculator here:
>
>        http://boatsafe.com/tools/horizon.htm
>
> a 1-mile Wall would be visible for 97.8 statute miles.  Perhaps league has
> an ambiguous meaning similar to chiliad; if young Severian had been up late
> the night before units class, perhaps he misheard a league as three furlongs
> instead of three miles?  A Wall 3/8 mile tall would be visible for 59.9
> statute miles...still too long to walk in a day.

This is where I get to. Sev says that the highest flying birds such as
eagles, wild geese etc might be able to fly over the wall, or something like
that. Wikipedia trawling suggests a Wall height of something less than
25,000ft. This is about the minimum height consistent with "several
leagues", even for a 1.5 mile league.

At 25,000ft the Wall peeps over the horizon at a distance of about 200
miles, for somebody at sea level. For somebody at the top of a (say) 300ft
torturers' tower, it's around 175 miles.

Sev travels for something less than 4 days to get to the Wall, by my
reckoning:

- First day ends sharing a bed with Baldanders.
- Second day ends sharing a bed with Dorcas in the barracks, after the fight
at the Sanguinary Field.
- Third day ends with Talos' company, after the play.
- Arrives at the Wall during the fourth day.

Especially given that he does a lot of non-travelling stuff along the way
(and has Dorcas as companion for half of the journey), a rate of ~50 miles
per day doesn't seem very likely.

If you want to make a consistent story out of this, maybe the thing to
question is Sev's estimate of the height - how could he do this confidently?

If the Wall is "only" a mile high, then it's maybe 75 miles or so from the
Citadel, and ~20 miles per day seems kind of reasonable.

But it's probably not worth too much effort trying to make sense of a BDO :)

Oh, another thing: Sev says he could see the Wall to the north from the top
of the tower, but what about east and west?
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