Entering New Crobuzon description
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around you. You rock and pitch in a deep current.
Behind you Abel tugs at his rudder and the barge corrects and over the engine's oily rumble and caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain. They surround you. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate and their walls are strong brick
The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. It's light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise blood. It's dirty towers glow. An extraordinary presence that his stilted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky and it is no longer the current which pulls you but the city itself....
Faint shouts here and there, the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering and cobbled mazes of streets begin to appear as your barge continues it's precarious journey.
"This is Raven's Gate" Abel mutters to you as he hawks foully into the water. The rotting rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted, in this brutalised warren around you. The river smears slime on it's brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay....there is a vile stink here. There are houses which dribble pale mucus, an organic daubing that smears base façades and oozes from top windows. Extra storeys are rendered in the cold white muck which fills gaps between houses and dead end alleys. The landscape is defaced with ripples as if wax has melted and set suddenly across rooftops... some other intelligence has made these human streets their own. Wires are stretched tight across the river and eaves, held fast by milky aggregates of phlegm. They hum like bass strings. Something scuttles overhead.
A train whistles as it crosses the river before you on raised track, you look at it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by the city, this behemoth that eats it's citizens. You pass by factories with cranes rearing from the gloom like spindly birds, here and there they move to keep the crews in their work. Their chains swinging deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn.
The water here reflects the sky through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. The engine slows and Abel takes you in to dock, there behind the warehouse so engorged it's contents spill out beyond the buttresses in a labyrinth of huge boxes. He picks his way through other boats and rooves of sunken houses, seemingly build on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the wall. There are disturbances beneath you as the river boils with eddies from below. Dead fish and frogs that have given up the fight to breathe in this rotting stew of detritus swirl franticly between the side of the barge and the concrete shore, trapped in a choppy turmoil.
The gap is closed and Abel leaps ashore and ties the barge up. He turns to face you and gestures with a smug smile and an outstretched hand
"Welcome....to New Crobuzon"
Behind you Abel tugs at his rudder and the barge corrects and over the engine's oily rumble and caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain. They surround you. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate and their walls are strong brick
The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. It's light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise blood. It's dirty towers glow. An extraordinary presence that his stilted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky and it is no longer the current which pulls you but the city itself....
Faint shouts here and there, the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering and cobbled mazes of streets begin to appear as your barge continues it's precarious journey.
"This is Raven's Gate" Abel mutters to you as he hawks foully into the water. The rotting rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted, in this brutalised warren around you. The river smears slime on it's brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay....there is a vile stink here. There are houses which dribble pale mucus, an organic daubing that smears base façades and oozes from top windows. Extra storeys are rendered in the cold white muck which fills gaps between houses and dead end alleys. The landscape is defaced with ripples as if wax has melted and set suddenly across rooftops... some other intelligence has made these human streets their own. Wires are stretched tight across the river and eaves, held fast by milky aggregates of phlegm. They hum like bass strings. Something scuttles overhead.
A train whistles as it crosses the river before you on raised track, you look at it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by the city, this behemoth that eats it's citizens. You pass by factories with cranes rearing from the gloom like spindly birds, here and there they move to keep the crews in their work. Their chains swinging deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn.
The water here reflects the sky through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. The engine slows and Abel takes you in to dock, there behind the warehouse so engorged it's contents spill out beyond the buttresses in a labyrinth of huge boxes. He picks his way through other boats and rooves of sunken houses, seemingly build on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the wall. There are disturbances beneath you as the river boils with eddies from below. Dead fish and frogs that have given up the fight to breathe in this rotting stew of detritus swirl franticly between the side of the barge and the concrete shore, trapped in a choppy turmoil.
The gap is closed and Abel leaps ashore and ties the barge up. He turns to face you and gestures with a smug smile and an outstretched hand
"Welcome....to New Crobuzon"
