From: Peter Westlake <peter@harlequin.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Calendars
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 22:34:51 +0100

At 14:33 1999-08-20 -0400, Michael Straight wrote:
>
>
>On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Peter Westlake wrote:
>
>> How are all the deductions about calendars and saints' days affected
>> by the idea of the Commonwealth being in the Southern Hemisphere?
>> Personally I'm convinced that it's North of the Equator. 
>
>True North or magnetic North?

True North. Quite possibly magnetic South, but I don't insist on that.
The fauna and flora of the Commonwealth are all South American, but
not all of South America is in the Southern Hemisphere. When Severian
is walking along the coast in _Citadel_, chapter XXXII, "The Samru",
he says that the land is to the East and the sea to the West [1]. So
he's on the West coast. Then he walks North, with the sun rising on his
right. There would be nothing wrong with that if it were true, but
I don't think it is. Severian has a perfect memory, but seems unable
to follow directions. He *always* gets lost. Every single time. If he
hasn't misremembered the directions, he must be misinterpreting them,
and I believe he has left and right mixed up. In that case the Sun is
on the left, and he is heading what we would call "South". This idea
has the advantage that it explains "the isles of the South" where
Hellvard's people hunt walruses. The ones in our South are close to
the coast, and too close to the expanded icecap of the cooling world;
Hellvard hunts in the Caribbean.

SBear.

[1] conclusively disproving the theory of Nessus as Buenos Aires,
    I think?


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