The Small Rain, Low-Lands : A Few Questions

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

--- rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au> wrote:
> Maybe Mr P has misused the phrase then because this dump's "roughly
> square, half a mile on each side, sunk fifty feet below the streets
> of
> the sprawling housing development which surrounded it."(*SL*64) And a
> couple of pages later the caretaker, Bolingbroke, leads Dennis and
> Pig
> up out of the spiral again to get a mattress each: "up a slope,
> around a
> tall tower of bank run" and then on past all the refrigerators,
> bicycles, washing machines &c. I've got a picture of it in my head,
> but
> it's much taller than a riverbank would be ("tower", "pinnacle");
> just a
> high shelf of debris.

"Bank Run" is often used as fill at the site of excavations where a
civil engineer wants ensure that the filled ground remains permeable to
water.  At a landfill site I suppose that moving groundwater would be
tarred with the epithet "leachate."  A heap of gravel might be in the
form of a steep cone, so "pinnacle" is OK -- "tower" might be more of a
stretch, unless P means that the heap is very tall.  A tall heap of
gravel would slope at its angle of repose, and would therefore be at
the limit of its stability and prone to unpredictable slides.  rj, do
you think the implied instability of a tall feature, made of the stuff
which will eventually be used to bury everything, towering over the
lowland of the dump, might work thematically?

Mark
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