ATDTDA 770-772

Thu Feb 28 13:17:20 CST 2008

ATDTDA 770

"the Kara Tagh looked like a stone city"

Maybe it WAS a city?

the Altai range

http://picasaweb.google.com/somehowlost/070606CrossingMongoliaPart4/photo#50766208823482094

90

"for they fell faster than the local speed of sound"  Not unlike V-2s.

"At any moment a loose rock fragment might fall too fast for Kit to hear before it slashed into him"
A certain Tyrone Slothrop had a similar paranoid presentiment.

A golden eagle  Why does Pynchon make a point of referring to it as "a she?"

"a great choral bellowing over the desert" Any thoughts on this one?

ATDTDA 771

"Often the dream came just before dawn" Is there any way to interpret Kit's dream"?

"where dust-covered spectres moved chained together"

Cf. From the side it always looked medieval, the way the chain hung down in bights between their neck-rings, the way the weight pulled them constantly toward earth, the force only just overcome as long as they managed to keep their legs moving. Behind them came army oxcarts, driven by loyal Rehoboth Bastards. How many can understand the resemblance he saw? In his village church in the Palatinate was a mural of the Dance of Death, led by a rather sinuous, effeminate Death in his black cloak, carrying his scythe and followed by all ranks of society from prince to peasant. Their own African progress was hardly so elegant: they could only boast a homogeneous string of suffering Negroes and a drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a Mauser. Yet that association, which most of them shared, was enough to give the unpopular chore an atmosphere of ceremony. V.

Turfan

Turfan (Uyghur: تۇرپان‎, Turpan, Turpan, Modern Chinese 吐魯番, Pinyin: Tǔlǔfān; is an oasis city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Its population was 254,900 at the end of 2003.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turfan

The Flaming Mountains

As one of the hottest places on earth, Flaming Mountain has always been a famous tourist attraction, with its harsh yet unique natural conditions, as well as abundant cultural heritage. Located on the northern edge of the Turpan Basin, Flaming Mountain runs 10 kilometers east of Turpan city, stretching up to 100 kilometers from east to west and about 10 ilometers from south to north. The mountain begins at Liusha River in Shanshan County in the east and ends in Peach Valley in the west. 

http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_curiosity/2004-07/28/content_57271.htm

The Flaming Mountain is very popular thanks to a classical novel, The Journey to the West by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) writer, Wu Cheng'en and its charming hero-- The Monkey King. In the Han account of the legend, it is said the Monkey King stirred up trouble in Heaven and kicked off the oven for making immortal pills. Charcoals fell from the sky to where the Flaming Mountain now lies-- in the middle of Turpan Basin. According to the Uigur version, a vicious dragon lived in deep Tianshan Mountain and ate little children. A Uigur hero fought gallantly against the dragon for three days and three nights and cut the dragon into eight parts. The remains of the dragon turned to a scarlet mountain colored by its blood. The eight scars turned into the eight valleys in the Flaming Mountain, including the famous Grape Valley.

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/xinjiang/turpan/mt_flaming.htm

http://lobota.tripod.com/flamingmountains.jpg

Sangre de Cristos

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Spanish for "Blood of Christ") are the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains. They are located in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the United States. The mountains run from Poncha Pass in South-Central Colorado, trending southeast and south, ending at a point southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mountains contain a number of fourteen thousand foot peaks in the Colorado portion, as well as all of the peaks in New Mexico which are over thirteen thousand feet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangre_de_Cristo_Mountains

"this space the Gate had opened to them"  What space might that be?

ATDTDA 772

"the ancient kingdom of Khocho"

The Khocho Ruins is located in the Mutougou river delta at the south foothill of the flame mountain and is 45 km from Turpan city of Xinjiang. It began construction in the B.C. first century of Han Dynasty. It is one of the treasured places of religion culture in the world. The Khocho Ruins assumes the rectangle shape with a perimeter of 5.4 km divided into three parts consisting of the outer city, the inner city and the imperial city. The outside wall base’s width is 12 meters and the wall’s height is 11.5 meters and it was built with earth. There are nine gates in the entire 
and the west side of the north city gate has the best preservation.
Khocho Ruins was abandoned in the end of the 13 century’s because of wars and majority of the buildings vanished. At present, the southwest and southeast corner outer city gate preserves two temples ruins. There is an irregular shape small castle in the center of the north inner city and the native calls it the khan fort. In 1961, Khocho Ruins is listed as one of the country’s key cultural relic preservation organ.

http://www.dreamstime.com/khocho-ruins-image3703132

Descriptions of the kingdom of Shambhala are based both on literature said to emanate from Shambhala itself and by later commentators, mainly Tibetans, who claimed to have visited the kingdom in the material realm, on an etheric plane, in dreams, or by some other means. As the descriptions will make clear, this is not an “historical” Shambhala; i.e., a country that once existed in the time-space continuum recognized by Western historiography—for instance, the ancient kingdom of Uighur kingdom of Khocho, sometimes identified as Shambhala, but instead what we may call the “Pure Land” version of Shambhala. This of course does not necessarily imply that this version does not “exist” in some spiritual or etheric plane.

http://www.shambhala.mn/Shambhala-Thangka/shambhala-thangka.html

About early Uyghur culture and its history, Kingdom Professor Denis Sinor wrote: "The kingdom of Khocho [Idпqut Uyghur Kingdom], ruled by the Turkic Uyghurs, was multiracial, multilingual and [it] permitted the peaceful coexistence of many religions. It enjoyed a living standard unparalleled in medieval Central Eurasia.... Among the non-Muslim Turkic peoples, none has reached the degree of civilization attained by the Uyghurs, and they developed a culture in many respects more sophisticated than that of most of Muslim Turks. In the visual arts, they continued a tradition, non-Turkic in origin, of which they maintained very high standards. The script they used gained widespread acceptance both to the east and the west. The Uyghurs undoubtedly wrote one of the brighter chapters of Central Eurasian history." 

http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/061002/kamberiStatement.php

Urumchi

Wade–Giles romanization  Wu-lu-mu-ch'i,  Pinyin  Ürümqi,   city in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang, northwestern China. Urumchi (Mongolian: “Fine Pasture”) is the capital of the autonomous region. Situated in a fertile belt of oases along the northern face of the T'ien Shan (mountains), the city commands the northern end of a gap leading from the Tarim Basin into the Dzungarian Basin. 

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9074507/Urumchi

Dzungaria

physical region (c.300,000 sq mi/777,000 sq km) of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, NW China. It is a largely steppe and semidesert basin surrounded by high mountains (the Tian Shan in the south and
the Altai in the north). Wheat, barley, oats, and sugar beets are grown, and cattle, sheep, and horses are raised. The fields are irrigated with melted snow from the permanently white-capped mountains. Ürümqi (Urumchi) and Yining (Kuldja) are the main cities; other smaller oasis towns dot the piedmont areas. The population consists of Uigurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Chinese; since 1953 there has been a massive influx of Chinese to work on water conservation and industrial projects. The Dzungaria has deposits of coal, iron, and gold, as well as large oil fields. Dzungaria (named for the Dzungar, one of the Mongol tribes) was ruled by a confederation of Western Mongols that established (17th cent.) a large empire in central Asia. The region passed to the Chinese in the mid-18th cent. The Dzungarian Alatau is a mountain chain that lies on the boundary of Xinjiang and Kazakhstan (see Alatau). At the 
eastern end of the chain, on the Kazakhstan-Chinese border, lies the Dzungarian Gate, a pass which for centuries was used as an invasion route by conquerors from central Asia. The name also appears as Jungaria, Sungaria, or Zungaria.

http://www.bartleby.com/65/dz/Dzungari.html

Kiang, Tibetan wild ass 

http://www.ultimateungulate.com/Perissodactyla/Equus_kiang.html

"some wild ass stampede" Pynchonian Pun. Love them. Especially the bad ones!

"they took refuge in a grove of flowering hemp" 

See: Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm

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