Infinity's Shore by David Brin

learn it? On Earth? Near some alien star?
    â€œAnyway,” Kurt went on, “if you can stand riding these huge beasts awhile longer, we may reach Mount Guenn sooner than Ovoom.”
    â€œThat’s crazy! You must pass
through
Ovoom if you go by sea. And the other way around is worse—through the funnel canyons and the Vale.”
    Kurt’s eyes flickered. “I’m told there’s a … more direct route.”
    â€œDirect? You mean due
south?
Past the Gentt lies the Plain of Sharp Sand, a desperate crossing under good conditions—which these
aren’t.
Have you forgotten that’s where Dedinger has followers?”
    â€œNo, I haven’t forgotten.”
    â€œThen, assuming we get past the sandmen and flame dunes, there comes the
Spectral Flow
, making any normal desert seem like a meadow!”
    Kurt only shrugged, but clearly he wanted her to accompany him toward a distant simmering mountain, far from where Sara had sworn to take Emerson. Away from Lark and Dwer, and the terrible attraction of those fierce starships. Toward a starkly sacred part of Jijo, renowned for one thing above all—the way the planet renewed itself with flaming lava heat.
Alvin

    M AYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little
Wuphon’s Dream
fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam—immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub—speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many titanic things, all jumbled together, that—
    Here I admit I’m stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors—saying
this
object is made up of clusters of colossal
cubes
connected by translucent rods, or
that
one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.
    Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I
couldn’t tell how far away anything was
! The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects—piled across the muddy panorama—seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of
behmo
serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.
    Another way to describe the unknown is to
compare
it to things you already recognize … only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can’t begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward greatheaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.
    Oh,
some
objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity—like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once scraped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things
can
be reclaimed—in Mother Jijo’s fiery bowels.
    I recalled some books I’d read, dating from Earth’s Era of