SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

Bureau of Returning Persons — area sheet

Brathe

Brathe in watercolour: a wide dry hollow with a cracked bare floor and stepped rims in the middle of dry yellow grassland, eight poured and carved dwellings standing at one height round it with short flights of steps going down toward it, among them a spire ridged like a corkscrew, two low star-shaped masses and one with a low bay open at the ground; a road coming down from the top left and another climbing out to the right, standing stones, and dry hazy hills behind. No fog anywhere.
Cf. FilmThe ground the plate is drawn from.
BRATHE

low, and dry

Brathe is the lowest ground between Thur and Hesk, and there is no fog in it. It is built as though there were.

You came in from Thur, forty kadd and downhill the whole way, and you will remember that the going down did not stop where the houses start. Brathe sits in the bottom of a long shallow ground, and the houses sit in the bottom of Brathe.

The hollow is dry. It has been dry in every record the Bureau holds and there is no account of it being otherwise. The houses stand round it at one height with their steps to it, and the steps go down to nothing.

Hesk is seventy kadd on, and the road out of Brathe climbs from the first step. Persons going from Thur to Hesk do not always come through Brathe. Persons who come through Brathe stop.

The hollows below the last step are kept. Nothing comes up in them, and they are kept.

FrameA circle cut flat across the top, as Hesk’s is. Nothing at Brathe fills to the line. ViewpointDrawn from above, as inhabited areas are.
Key
  1. 21 Brathe the lowest ground between Thur and Hesk
  2. 22 The hollow dry, with steps down to it
From here

How far is not recorded. How long is.

Office annotationForty and seventy do not make the ninety the Bureau entered for Thur to Hesk. The Office has checked the ninety. It stands, and so do the forty and the seventy.