ES Question

For you Crowley experts: Dumb me, no doubt, but a mystery left in my mind from Engine Summer is that the people never seem to eat any food and seem to be sustained entirely on St. Bea's Bread smoke. Okay, okay, allusions to marijuana maybe. But as this is an SF tale, something other than magic must be at work. Rush and his buddy seem to last a whole winter with no food, in a trance. I'm sure someone has this figured out. So do me a favor, whydoncha, and lemme in on the answer. Nutria

Not that this is a final answer, of course, bfwiw I thought the allusion was to hashish rather than marijuana. And "hash" is the name of a foodstuff, too. As for the sfnal rational, the stuff was brought back by an interstellar probe. Like you said before, mana from heaven. The winter they spent in a trance, that was due to a different substance, wasn't it? (Probably one of the daughters of medicine: those four little pots. One was birth allowance, one was lighten the load, one was near immortality) Because the St. Bea's Bread was something they smoked three or four times a day, no big deal; but that winter in the treehouse was something different for Rush That Speaks, iirc. Go Ask Alice, I think she knows. =mantis=