Dream d2721-s: Summit Before the Foot

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried the second book to the Pewterlow terraces and climbed by the first road out, the one that begins at the river gate and doubles back on itself three times before it reaches the top. Lano went ahead on the first two turns and waited at the third, ears up, nose reading the cold.

The terraces are nine. I counted them from the road before I began the climb. The second book shows nine. The record holds.

What the second book does not show is the order in which they were made. I looked for that order in the stone, as the Surveyor's office requires when no account survives, and found it without difficulty because the stone is not all one kind.

The lowest terrace - broadest, nearest the river gate, drainage cuts deepest - is the newest. Dressed stone, straight mortar, corners square in the way of a careful recent hand.

The second and third are the same hand but earlier: the stone dressed but the mortar leaning, the corners almost square. The iron was not yet plentiful.

The fourth and fifth are rubble-core with a face of flat stone. The core shows in three places where the face has fallen. The mortar is lime and pebble and the colour of old teeth.

The sixth terrace is not built. It is removed. Whoever made it took the natural step of the ridge, deepened it, squared it, and left it. No mortar, no dressing. The rock face at its back is still raw.

The seventh and eighth are rubble without facing. They hold because of their width. They are barely terraces - wide steps someone chose not to fill in.

The ninth, the highest, is a single flat shelf of the original hillside: bedrock exposed, nothing done to it but a low wall of heaped fieldstone at its outer edge. The fieldstone is not set. It was placed and it stays because nothing has moved it.

The order, as found, runs from the summit down. Oldest at the top, newest at the foot. Whoever built the lowest terrace built toward the hill and not away from it, filling in the approach to what had long been standing. I wrote this under the heading the office requires: Order as Found, Unexplained.

Lano sat beside me while I wrote. When I closed the book and stood, she pressed briefly against my leg, then stepped to the outer wall and looked down the road toward the river gate and the dark below.

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