Jijangola

We came up over the edge of the Greenhouse Cliff this morning, rising out of the cloud layers like saltwater chucklefish rising out of the sea. The sky was filled with sunset. I'd almost forgotten what the sky looked like. Sheets and wisps of flaming orange and peach spread across the ocean-blue background in a ferocious, explosive, magnificent wave that would look completely unbelievable in any picture. Skies can't possibly be that incredibly bright.

This one was, though - and silhouetted against it was the dark, lamplit bulk of Jijangola.

Or, at least, the Galleria of Jijangola.

Same thing.

The Galleria is a massive, insanely intricate, palatial labyrinth of stonework that has been growing in Jijangola for almost two hundred years. The village's houses are long gone. They were in the way. The people live in the nooks and crannies and vaulted passages of the Galleria instead.

When we arrived, it was nearly dark (hence the sunset), and it started raining shortly after we reached ground level. The Jijangolans welcomed us into the Galleria, at least the ones who weren't too absorbed in working on it, and said vaguely that we were welcome to spend the night, or longer, they didn't really care as long as we didn't damage the decorations, and there was some food over that way somewhere if we were hungry.

There was indeed food over that way somewhere, in the form of half a dozen plumpkins on pedestals. They were in a domed room covered with tesselated fish mosaics.

We split one, then moved on into the Galleria...

I'll write more about that tomorrow, though. The wind up here makes it hard to write, and the postbird's getting impatient.

One more thing, though. The people of Jijangola have never taken the time to build a Train station - too busy building the Galleria - but the village is officially part of the Railway Regions. We've made it!

Dinner and a Show

Walking uphill takes a lot longer than walking downhill. Missing bridges don't help either. One hole in the road today, a rather large one, had no sign of a bridge except a few forlorn ropes on posts at both sides. We had to cross on tree roots so covered with moss that it was impossible to tell whether they were rotten or not...

That was all right, though, because we were entertained the rest of the day by capybaras. They seemed to feel it was their duty to walk backwards on the road in front of us and juggle beetles. One of them, a particularly large one, juggled small capybaras who were juggling beetles. I've heard of compound juggling before, but I'd never seen it until today. They didn't speak English (or any other language I know), so we couldn't thank them, but I clapped when we stopped for the evening. Plack gave a sort of non-disdainful snort. The capybaras bowed, squeaked something at us, gave us a grapefruit (which went very nicely with dinner), and went back to their holes in the rock. A few minutes later, the Cliff above and below us lit up with hundreds of tiny windows. Someone started playing what sounded like a miniature harpsichord.

Today has been weird, but entertaining.

In other news, I seem to be growing yet another toe. One more, and I can break my record of last Summer!

Directions

We found the road today; someone finally gave us directions! Every salamander hunter we've met so far has been either unwilling to talk or just as lost as we are, and the only other person we've met was the captain of the Fernmarvel, who wasn't interested in roads. Roads and airships don't have much in common.

Today, though, we finally met a hunter who wasn't too busy sitting around and waiting to talk to us. This was probably because she was leaving the Boiler Room herself. We passed her coming from a small lava pool in a long stretch of canyon with hardly any of them at all. She was humanoid, dressed in leather from head to toe like most of the more sensitive-skinned salamander hunters. A leather mask and a typical pair of dark hunter's goggles (important when you spend all day staring into pools of lava) covered her face.

Plack and I had almost given up hope asking directions by then, but the sight of someone who wasn't completely engrossed in a pool of molten rock was unusual enough that we tried again.

She gave us directions (hooray!) in a clear alto voice, somewhat muffled by the mask, then went on to explain how she knew where the road was because she had come from the Cliff we were about to start climbing, several weeks ago, before spending the time in between at a remote and lonely lava pool farther along this fairly empty stretch of canyon, because not many hunters came all the way out here and that meant that the salamanders were a lot less cautious and could be caught more easily, which was why she had been so successful. (She obviously had, too; she was carrying four large cages full of the little creatures. Most of them were either chewing on what looked like lumps of coal or looking around, wide-eyed, at the strange wet world above the lava.) She continued that she was heading to Sconth, if she could find it, to sell the salamanders to the farms there that supply lanterns for the libraries, and also to visit her aunt, who ran a small cafe (the Algebraic Apple - perhaps I had heard of it? I hadn't) near the Metallurgical Library, and who needed a new salamander for her oven, since one of hers had somehow gotten its paws on some gunpowder and exploded, so this big one right here - with the blue spots - was going to replace it, because the little ones had time to grow before going off to light libraries, but her aunt needed a big one right away, because if she had to keep going with only the one she still had, it would soon be too tired to bake more than one scone at a time, and then where would all the experimental coppersmiths get their lunches every day? At one of those sad little turnip crisp places? That just wouldn't do.

The Greenhouse Cliff is not a place where you meet many people. The more outgoing travelers generally have to make up for weeks of silence in every conversation.

The hunter kept squinting at us, apparently having difficulty seeing us through her dark goggles. About halfway through the conversation, she took them off to reveal five gleaming compound eyes. I have no idea what the rest of her face looked like; she never took off her mask. After about half an hour, she had apparently talked enough, because she then asked us for directions to the other side. We gave them to her - the road ended near a large dead tree that was fairly easy to spot - and headed on.

Just as she said, the road to the other side began right next to a large, gnarled purple pligma. Apparently, this section is cool enough for them to grow. We reached the bottom of the jungle again this evening; with any luck, we should reach the other top of the Greenhouse Cliff in a few more days.

Lunch on the BAS Fernmarvel

There's still no sign of the road, but we found something much more interesting today.

We had been walking for most of the morning, passing hot springs and salamander hunters crouched over lava pools, when the scraps started appearing. They were widely scattered at first - just a shred here and there, pieces of the tough grub silk used for airship balloons. The airtight wax had melted off long ago.

We followed them for a while, having nothing better to do while looking for the road. I picked them up idly as we walked.

There were more of them the farther we went. It was getting hard to find a spring or patch of ground that didn't have a scrap of cloth in it somewhere when we came around a steam vent and saw the gondola.

It was obviously the source of the scraps: an old airship gondola, practically an antique, covered with old-fashioned Caroque scrollwork and tarnished brass. It was half-submerged, nose-down, in a steaming hot spring. The cockpit was completely underwater. It had been brightly painted once; faint patches of red and gold remained in crevices and the frames of the shattered windows. The steam had taken most of it off.

It took me a moment to realize what it was, as I'd never seen an airship gondola without its balloons before. They were completely gone. That was hardly surprising, though, as their remains were spread over several miles of the canyon. The hydrogen must have ignited at some point. The support ropes drooped forlornly from their hooks, rotting in the damp.

As we got closer (after all, if you find a crashed airship, how can you not investigate it?), we saw that the spring it was sticking out of was an odd gray-green color. It smelled like an explosion in a tea shop. Some sort of mineral thing, I assumed. That happens to some hot springs.

We were sitting there staring when a man came out of a small hatch near the back (now the top) of the airship. All we could see from the ground was that he was small and purple.

"Ahoy, visitors!" he shouted. "That's the sight I like to see, yes sir, it is! Got any tea? No? No, you don't look like the type. That's all right, we can't all have tea, after all. Well, what are you waiting for? Come in, come in! I haven't got all day! Well, actually I do, but who cares about that? I've got lunch, that's what matters! Come in and we'll eat it!"

With that, he disappeared back inside, still talking.

We hesitated for a moment. It had been a rather unusual greeting. After walking unsuccessfully all morning, though, I was rather tired of it, and an invitation to lunch was no less welcome because the person who gave it was a bit odd. Most people are a bit odd.

Fortunately, there was another door farther down the airship; there was enough ornamentation on the hull that I could have climbed to the upper door, but Plack couldn't have managed it. Llamas can't climb vertical surfaces. He was reluctant to go in at all at first, but the promise of lunch was enough to tempt someone who had been eating nothing but cube turnips since we left the upper jungle.

The man we had seen opened the lower door as we reached it. He was a reptile of some sort, about four feet tall and stocky, with the most enormous ears I've ever seen. Except for his silver-tinged purple scales, he looked almost like a flightless bat. He was wearing an old captain's uniform, very worn and faded, patched with scraps of the same fabric that lay all over the ground outside. I think it had once been blue. The shoulders and lapels were trimmed with scuffed gold braid.

"Ah, there you are, good!" He beamed up at us. "Come right in, I got lunch all ready on the boiler, we can use the good china from the old days! You must be wondering who I am, eh? I'm the captain of this here ship! Been sailing the skies for thirty years! Been sailing this here puddle for the last twelve, actually, but I likes it here, so that's all right. Only problem is there's no one to talk to. Had to talk to myself since last week. You're here now, though, so I can make up for lost time! Come in and eat!"

The captain spent the next few hours showing us around his airship - the parts of it still above water, anyway - and served us a lunch of boiled cacti (deflated), geyser shrimp, and scones on chipped, fern-patterned gilt china. Apparently, he boiled his food in the hottest part of the spring. It had the same strange herbal smell that the water did. I don't normally drink water that smells strange; the captain seemed perfectly healthy, though - almost frighteningly so - so I didn't worry about it. It did make the food taste good.

The airship was magnificent. It was gradually disintegrating in the heat and the damp of the Boiler Room, but it must have been one of the most splendid airships in the sky before it crashed. Every room was a masterpiece of lightweight Caroque architecture. Carved float-wood panels made up the walls, every unmildewed curve and curlicue still gleaming in the dim orange light coming in through the cracked gallery windows. Light bronze leaf coated the banisters of the stairs. The grand ballroom was missing the entire upper wall; trees grew there, sheltered from the heat outside. Their branches echoed the arches of the broken Palladian windows. Fifteen years of fallen leaves and branches from the jungle overhead had turned into a thick layer of soil, perfect for their fallen seeds.

"Not much of a ballroom now, this place," the captain commented. "A conservatory, that's what it is, and you won't find better on any other airship, they got to be retired like the old Fernmarvel here." (That was how we found out the airship's name; the gilded letters on the hull had long since vanished, either fallen off or stolen.) "You like jellyapples? Course you do, who doesn't like jellyapples, no one I know, and I got 'em growing right over there by the staircase. I'll get us a few after lunch."

We finished lunch (and the promised jellyapples) in the old navigator's cockpit, a small, cozy room full of rusted machinery and water that had leaked in through the shattered observation windows. Like the water outside - even more so, actually - it was green and steaming and smelled like tea. The captain sat right in the middle of the rising steam, perched on the back of an old swiveling chair bolted to the deck. It stuck out diagonally over the water now.

The cockpit was full of souvenirs of the airship's travels: fossils from the Golden Desert, cyclonoscopes from Mount Moler, a compass still faithfully pointing to a tree in Bannarbangle, seashells resplendent with spines and spirals, a tiny lizard saddle, a four-foot havernack tooth from Morianny carved into the shape of a lighthouse, tasselled Tetravanian tapestries, coins from all over Hamjamser strung from the ceiling... An airship can pick up a lot in thirty years. An antique pipe crawler, still ticking, slept in a glass case to keep its clockwork dry. None of the airship's plumbing worked anymore; the captain had replaced its pipe-wrench claws with scissors and a sewing machine needle so that it could repair his uniform. The strange green scent of the water filled the room.

The captain sighed happily and settled down in the middle of it all to chew his jellyapple. "I've never liked the cold." He shook his head fiercely. "Not even when I was young. Never liked it. Only thing I didn't like about flying an airship, well, that and snobby passengers, never liked them either. I'm more comfortable here than I've been in decades. After we crashed, the crew, passengers all left. I stayed behind. Went down with my ship, I did, and I'm not about to come back up without it, no sir! (That's me, you see - sir - since I'm the captain.) I like this place. I got heat, I got steam for me old lungs, high altitudes weren't good to 'em, and-" he pointed to the steaming, greenish water below - "I got the biggest teapot in the world!"

That explained the smell and the odd greenish color, then. Not minerals after all. It was an entire spring of tea.

He grinned. "You must be wondering where I gets it, yes?" (I was, in fact, but he didn't wait for an answer.) "Hunters bring it to me. All kinds. Green tea, chamomile, Vinchess Purple, mint, fruit zinger - I got 'em all mixed in there. I gives 'em information, you see. I know where the big salamanders hide. I can hear 'em." He tapped one enormous, leathery ear. "Hear 'em all the way from here, humming to themselves down in the lava."

We sat there in the tea-steamed clutter of the cockpit for several hours, listening to the captain tell stories of his travels. I might post a few of them someday if I remember. He sent us off near sunset with the leftovers; there was far more food than the three of us could eat in one meal. We've got a whole bag full of cacti, shrimp, and everlasting ship's scones. Overall, it was the best lunch I've had since eating at the Potted Pumpkin in Cormilack. I don't think the salamander hunters just come for advice.

Neither Plack nor I had a chance to say a single word the whole time. The captain talked constantly. We did say goodbye when we left, but he had started an impassioned monologue to his pipe crawler by then, and I don't think he heard us.

I'll have to remember to bring some tea the next time I cross the Greenhouse Cliff.

The Boiler Room

The Greenhouse Cliff is actually a canyon - and a relatively narrow one at that; you can throw a chicken from one side to the other - but for some reason, it's always just a cliff at the top. The two edges never come near each other. That's why no one's ever built a bridge across it. On top of the cliff, you can see across the countryside - whatever countryside is visible, that is, under the havoc the Cliff's leaking clouds always make of the weather. Once you reach the bottom, though, you always have to climb the other side.

If you can find the road on the other side, that is. We haven't yet. Nothing but dripping vertical stone.

We're at the bottom of the canyon now, below the cloud layer, walking between the geysers and steam vents it comes from. It's so thick overhead that it blocks out most of the light. The darkest parts are like an overcast sunset, even when my pocketwatch says it's noon. The only noticeable light comes from the occasional cluster of lava pools. They just sit there in the ground, bubbling away like pots of soup. Inflatable cacti grow over them, floating upside down in midair with their leaves hanging down toward the light. The mist that condenses on their balloonlike roots is all the water they need. Most of it boils off fairly quickly. Very few large plants grow down here; it's too hot for them.

This part of the Greenhouse Cliff, below the Greenhouse part, is often called the Boiler Room. It's easy to see why.

The smaller lava pools have a salamander hunter each, sitting patiently like fishermen at ice holes; the larger pools have frameworks built across them, made of rusted metal or charred wood (nothing lasts very long down here, between the fire and the fog). The more agile hunters stalk across these, metal tongs held ready to grab any salamander that sticks its head above the surface. The small salamanders come up now and then to let off little bursts of flame. Their ability to absorb and release whatever energy is nearby is what makes them so useful, and predators so reluctant to mess with them, but it also means that only the big ones can stay beneath the lava all day. The small ones have to release excess energy now and then to avoid exploding. Every so often, bolts of lightning or bursts of multicolored light flash up from the lava when one of them decides to get creative. Energy is energy, after all, no matter what flavor. The slower-moving salamander hunters usually look as charred as their perches. They stare intently at the lava and shush you if you try to talk to them.

Troll Booth

All was going well today. Plack and I had been walking along the Greenhouse Cliff road for several hours, having slept at a slightly wider spot covered in moss last night. There are flowers and mushrooms everywhere. Moss covers every inch of rock rough enough to grip, trees and flowering plants grow out of the moss, and more moss and flowers grow on the branches of the trees. It's the same in every direction - left or right, up or down. The roots of the trees above the road hang down and embed themselves in the miniature gardens growing on the trees below. The Cliff jungle grows on itself as much as it grows on the cliff. The trees are only one layer thick; beyond the row of trunks is nothing but empty gray fog. Insects fly everywhere, drops of condensation fizzing off of their rapidly beating wings. Small birds of every possible shape and color are almost as common. Some of them visit flowers; others eat the insects. They have to work harder to find the green or cloud-gray ones. Whole colonies of small frogs fill every rock crevice and bromeliad.

We had just navigated the hairpin turn onto yet another switchback (half the road had crumbled away at the corner, which made it interesting) when we saw a small house ahead. It was two stories high, wedged beneath an unusually high part of the overhanging rock, and about six feet wide. Only two thirds of it actually fit on the road. The remaining two feet hung out over empty space. Another story - a basement? - stuck out of the cliff face beneath the rest of the house, supported by a network of rotting wooden beams.

Though the basement level was sagging and covered with moss, the upper floors of the house were perfectly neat and painted spotless white. A little stove chimney hung out over the cliff on the top floor.

We were standing there, staring at this odd little house built right across the road, when the troll came out.

Like most of the turnstile trolls that plague bridges and narrow roads all over the world, he was large and lumpy, with gray scales and hair. Unlike most of them, his hair was neatly combed (even his mane and ear tufts), and he was wearing an embroidered tunic and stockings. There were buckles on his shoes. Obviously, this was a rather successful troll.

"Your house," said Plack bluntly, "is in our way." He was still behind me, due to the narrowness of the road where we were; I suddenly wished that he wasn't.

"I knows it is," said the troll. With a wide grin full of gleaming white fangs, he then gave us the traditional turnstile troll greeting.

"Your money or your life!"

(This is not strictly true, as trolls have rarely actually killed anyone. It causes them more trouble than it's worth. The worst they usually do is hit people when they're irritated. It sounds scarier this way, though.)

Plack was not scared and not amused. "Why don't we keep both and you move your stupid house?"

"Your money or your life!"

"Or we could move it for you."

"Your money or your life!"

"Oh, shut up," snapped Plack. "Besides, what are you going to do if we don't pay you, you overdressed mushroom? Sit there and blind us with your teeth?"

I was starting to feel rather nervous by that point. When someone is insulting a troll, it's generally not a good idea to stand directly between them.

"You no pays me?"

"No. We doesn't."

The troll then proved himself to be one of the few trolls in the world who had never met a llama. With a slightly more evil grin, he pulled what looked like a four-foot spatula from inside the front door. "Then I wallops you until you does-"

A brown blur flew over my head, landed with a CLANG, and became Plack, standing in front of me and glaring at the troll. The spatula was bent in half in the middle. The troll was standing about a foot farther back than he had been; his feet had left skid marks in the dirt of the road.

His grin didn't even flicker. "-Then I lets you through right away and gives you breakfast."

He proceeded to do just that, showing us through his tiny and spotless kitchen (the entire first floor of his house) with all the care and politeness of a Clam-Porklian waiter. It was less than two minutes before we were on our way again, Plack with a basket of salad and a bottle of grundle juice, me with a sort of mushroom omelet that turned out to be better than what you get in most restaurants. The troll waved us happily on our way and sat down to wait for the next travelers. He might not have known about llamas before, but he does now. Trolls don't become successful by being stupid.

"'Never happened before,'" Plack snorted as we continued down the road. "Hah." He didn't say another word all day, but the smug smile didn't leave his face until after he was asleep.

In the past, several turnstile trolls have made a fairly good living for themselves thanks to me. I should have started traveling with a llama years ago.

The Edge of Sconth

We're leaving Sconth today. I'd like to stay longer and see more of the city, but the art most people like here is a lot more geometric than anything I do. Only two people have bought drawings since we arrived. Besides, we've been here over a week, and if we're going to reach the Railway Regions, I'd rather be on the Train before it starts snowing.

There's no sign of the slope we climbed on the way to Sconth. It's moved on to some other part of the Mountainous Plains. At the moment, the Plateau of Sconth seems to bordered on all sides by the Greenhouse Cliff, one of the only completely vertical regions of Hamjamser. Ever since the Cliff arrived, Sconth has been surrounded by the thick cloud bank that always follows it. The Plateau looks like an island in a sea of mist. Owners of dirigible leaf carriages are flying around on the surface of the cloud, pretending they're in boats. The butterflies that run the hotel have been back and forth to the Cliff all day to gather the bright tropical flowers from below the edge and enjoy the rare warm weather in November. It hasn't been warm enough for them to fly outdoors for over a month.

In a few places, where the cold air meets the mist, small showers of rain have been forming a few feet above the cloud's surface. I've heard there were a few four-foot-high snowstorms last night.

Looking down over the edge of the Cliff, past the scrub and scraggly trees that protect the Plateau's farms from the constant wind of the Mountainous Plains, the glistening canopies of rainforest trees are just visible through the mist. It's a surprising sight in late Autumn. Bright beetles and hummingbirds fly up now and then from the seasonless clouds, hit November in Sconth, and hurry back down again. Farther down, a faint orange glow is just barely visible through the gray. The volcanic vents that keep the Cliff tropical are down there somewhere. We're bound to meet at least a few salamander hunters when we cross them. (Salamanders breed perfectly well in captivity, but the farms like to get wild ones from volcanoes now and then to prevent inbreeding.)

I had hoped to get to the Railway Regions directly from the Mountainous Plains - it would have meant considerably less climbing, for one thing - but I've always wanted to see the Greenhouse Cliff, so I don't mind that much. The climb should be interesting. We've brought several cube turnips, hung by the leaves from Plack's harness like blocky purple saddlebags. They'll be a nice change from my usual diet of potatoes, smoked sump squid (my apologies to Commander Squish, but it travels well and tastes good, no matter how badly I cook it), and whatever else happens to be growing nearby.

Plack, incidentally, is not happy about the appearance of the Cliff. He's just started growing his Winter coat; tropical weather is the last thing he wants to travel through right now. It's not as if we have much of a choice, though, unless an airship shows up before we leave.

The main road through Sconth now reaches the edge of the Cliff and takes a sharp turn over the edge, twisting along between the lush undergrowth that sprouts from every crack and patch of dirt. The road was carved centuries ago into a groove in the stone; the Cliff hangs overhead like a damp gray roof. With the trees growing like leafy pillars at the edge of the road, it feels almost like the cloister of a monastery.

It will probably take us a while to get to the bottom of the Cliff. It's hard to travel quickly when the entire road consists of switchbacks.