The Wind Whales Of Ishmael by Farmer Philip José

Author:Farmer, Philip José [José, Farmer, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-19T16:02:34+00:00

Ishmael had asked Namalee how men could live in stone chambers that shook and trembled and threatened to come down on their heads every instant.

The answer was that few lived in the stone chambers. These were used for storage, for retreat from storms or enemies, and as places of worship they constituted the lower half of the city. The upper part was, in essence, a floating city. It consisted of two levels of hundreds of houses and larger buildings attached together and buoyed by thousands of great gas-bladders. The floating residential half was anchored at many places to the surface of the shelf, and passage between the floating city and the stone city was by means of ladders or flexible stairways.

All of this had been destroyed. Something had broken the bladders and exploded and burned the upper levels. Their charred and shattered remains were strewn and piled over the stone part. And this had been blasted open at many places to expose the chambers beneath. Piles of fragmented rock lay everywhere.

The Roolanga sailed back and forth before the tremendous shelf and several times over it before the captain decided to bring it into a dock. This was a sunken place carved into the lip of the shelf. The ship floated in with sails furled and the masts shipped. Sailors leaped off of the vessel as it slid into the rectangular depression, and they seized lines thrown them by those on the ship. The lines were run through carved stone rings projecting from the walls of the dock, looped through and then tightened. The ship slowed down even more and came to rest with the tip of its bow only a few inches from the rear wall of the dock. More gas was released from the great bladders, and the ship settled down until its keel almost touched the floor of the pier.

Half of the crew of thirty stayed aboard; the other half went into the ruins.

The shelf had its roots in an immense canyon, a slash in the body of the mountain. This rose so high that its top was a thread of dark blue. The massive shelf projected out into the air for perhaps half a mile, so that a shaft sunk through it would have ended in air and a view of the detritus-strewn slope beneath. Ishmael wondered that men would build on a ledge that was doomed to break off from the never-ending vibrations. But Namalee said that even if the stone did fall, it would snap off the anchors when it fell, and the two floating levels would remain in the air. That was the theory at least.

Water was provided most of the year by a spring at the base of the innermost wall of the canyon and the rest of the year by pods harvested from the vegetation at the foot of the mountain.

Ishmael thanked her for the information. He then asked her why she had been delegated to lead this party, when it would have been wiser to leave the only woman survivor, as far as anyone knew, on board.

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