The Pope's Rhinoceros [antikvár]

THIS SEA was once a lake of ice. High mountains overlooked a glacial plain frosted with snow and scoured by the freezing wind. Granite basins curved up from under the ice-tonnage to rim it with irregular coasts. In ages still to come, boulder waste and till will speak of the ice pack's tortuous inching over buried rock and sandstone; moraines and drumlins of advances and recessions that gouge out trenches and shunt forward ridges. The sea-floor here was prepared long before there was a sea to cover it. In the interim came the governance of ice.Faultlines and fractures healed and welded, grew invisible until the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, of Riga and Gdansk were indistinguishable from the central basin that joined them. Northerly blizzards left their drifts of snow which compacted down and thickened until the earth's very crust tilted under the weight. Veins of frozen oil ran like the hawsers of a ruined fleet, looping and meeting in the dark far below the surface. Grit speckled the ice pack as though .blasted out of the earth and suspended in mid-air, boulders shattered and hung immobile in the dark of this catastrophic freeze. Nothing breathed" here. This must once have been the deadest place on earth.This surface interruption: a pale disc of light germinating in the snow-flecked sky suggests a radical tilt to the axis below, gales cede to gusts and vicious whirlwinds, ice giants shout in the night. An inch of silt marks a thousand years, an aeon means a single degree' 3 '