Dream d3313-s: Knotted Cord at Umberfall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ledge was slick with mist and the falls came down in a continuous white thread, louder than I expected, the sound filling the whole gorge until it was less a sound than a condition of the air. The keeper stood at the edge with a cord looped over one shoulder, the knots spaced along it at intervals I could not count from where I stood.

Lano had come to the lip of the ledge and stopped there, nose low, reading the spray and the cold stone smell. She did not go closer. Her tail was still.

The keeper paid the cord out slowly over the water, letting it drop into the white thread of the falls, feeling for some measurement I did not understand. The knots moved through her fingers one by one. She did not speak. The relay clerk stood back against the rock wall with a small book open but not writing in it yet, waiting for whatever the keeper would say when she pulled the cord back.

I had read, somewhere before this return, that Umberfall had been described as a place of crossing. Standing here now I could not locate the crossing. There was only the falls and the ledge and the moss that grew in the spray-shadow, a deep umber-green, and the amber glow of the lantern the surveyor had set on a flat stone behind us. The light did not reach the water. The water did not need it.

The keeper drew the cord back through her hands and looked at the last knot where it had entered the water. She held it a moment, then said a number to the clerk, who wrote it down. That was the whole transaction. She looped the cord again over her shoulder.

What had been here before - the account I had read, the other witness's words - was elsewhere now. It had been handed over. This place did not know what had been written of it, or did not show that it knew. The falls continued. The keeper moved to a second position along the ledge, closer to the overhang where the water sheeted out from the rock, and began again with the cord.

Lano had found a dry spot near the lantern and lay down facing the falls, watching. The surveyor made a note. The relay clerk kept the book open.

I stood between them and did not write anything, only looked at the white thread of water and the knotted cord descending into it, measuring something that would be written down and carried out of here, while the falls themselves went on without record.

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