Seeing the signs...

David Stockhoff · 16 Dec 2010, 12:58 · from 2010-December.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 07:58:20 -0500
Subject: (urth) Seeing the signs...
In-Reply-To: <397FB6FA-2203-4CC3-B2CA-4984A7A80EAF at liftingfaces.com>
References: <397FB6FA-2203-4CC3-B2CA-4984A7A80EAF at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <4D0A0CEC.4020400 at verizon.net>

For those of you who want to talk about architecture, here is the full 
text about the Witches' Tower:

I entered a tower very different from our own. Ours was oppressively 
solid, of plates of metal so closely fitted that they had, ages ago, 
diffused into one another to become one mass, and the lower floors of 
our tower were warm and dripping. Nothing seemed solid in the witches' 
tower, and few things were. Much later, Master Palaemon explained to me 
that it was far older than most other parts of the Citadel, and had been 
built when the design of towers was still little more than the imitation 
in inanimate materials of human physiology, so that skeletons of steel 
were used to support a fabric of flimsier substances. With the passing 
of the centuries, that skeleton had largely corroded away?until at last 
the structure it had once stiffened was held up only by the piecemeal 
repairs of past generations. Oversized rooms were separated by walls not 
much thicker than draperies; no floor was level, and no stair straight; 
each banister and railing I touched seemed ready to come off in my hand. 
Gnostic designs in white, green, and purple had been chalked on the 
walls, but there was little furniture, and the air seemed colder than 
that outside. After climbing several stairs and a ladder lashed together 
from the unpeeled saplings of some fragrant tree, I was ushered into the 
presence of an old woman who sat in the only chair I had yet seen there, 
staring through a glass tabletop at what appeared to be an artificial 
landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled animals. I gave her my letter 
and was led away; but for a moment she had glanced at me, and her face, 
like the face of the young-old woman who had brought me to her, has of 
course remained graven in my mind.

Does anyone have any interpretations of this description? I'd guess this 
building was built in "our" age. With drop ceilings.

But what is the tabletop, and what was it about that face?

On 12/16/2010 1:01 AM, Ryan Dunn wrote:

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