Chapter eight
Through The Stratemsk“Ossa they would pile upon Olympos; and upon Ossa, Pelion with its rustling forests, that the very heavens might be scaled.”
This ambition of the Aloadai, Otos and Ephialtes, had always seemed to me a laudable goal, seeing that I myself had scrambled my way up through the hawsehole from the lower deck to the quarterdeck, and, since my startling arrival on Kregen beneath Antares, had fought my way to various arrogant-sounding posts and positions. But I had always thought of the tall twins’ activities of ambition as rhetorical. The actual idea of mountains piled one atop another had always seemed to me figures of speech, devices of the imagination. I have seen the Himalaya — the other mountain ranges of the world are subsumed in the lofty and frightening
