Posted by John Lambert on August 06, 2001 at 03:17:09 from 206.172.95.58:
In Reply to: Re: Size of Wild Cat Island posted by Dan Lind on August 03, 2001 at 17:51:14:
Dan,
In chapter one of SA, the Walkers are looking at the island from the
peak in Darien, Then we get the line: "The island lay about a mile away
towards the lower, southern end of the lake,..." If the island is that
far from Darien, then according to the endpaper map in SA, the lake must
be at least ten miles long - and Wild Cat Island about 3/4 of a mile
long.
If the lake were only 3400 yards long (under two miles), the D's could
have sailed the ice sledge from Rio Bay to the North Pole (WH) in about
10 minutes, because the distance is less than one mile. They could
easily have seen the North Pole from Rio Bay. The lake, therefore, must
be much longer than 3400 yards..
Either the maps cannot be relied upon to provide any sort of scale, or
AR slipped up when he wrote the line I have just quoted. I suspect he
deliberately changed the distances, etc. to conceal the lake's true
identity, as Robert Dilley suggests. In fact, on the endpaper map in WH,
Nancy has written "Future explorers must not rely on this map in
calculating distances." What more proof do we need? So it looks as
though any accurate creation of the lake and Wild Cat Island will be
a logical impossibility. Comments? APCD can also create an ice surface
on the lake. What a pity we can't zoom over the ice from Rio Bay to
the North Pole like the D's did.
John Lambert.