GR translation: down the vast unreadable underslope of Russia

[Monte Davis]

It's before dawn: spatially, the sun is still far "down" over the eastern
horizon. All that territory is invisible, thus unreadable. In military
tactics it's the "reverse slope": the far side of a ridge, hill or
embankment which you can't hit with flat-trajectory weapons. Goo9gle
translation of that yields

反向斜率 - Fǎn xiàng xiélǜ

To me "underslope" is a one-off, idiosyncratic coinage: if I saw it in
isolation, I'd guess it means the lower face of an overhanging ledge, or
maybe a strip of flat ground at the base of a slope..? Citations
notwithstanding, I don't think it has any clear consensus significance to
English-speaking readers. So you have a free hand.

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 4:24 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> V468.13-18, P475.40-376.4   The sun is still hours away, down the vast
> unreadable underslope of Russia. Fog closes in, and the engines slow.
> Wrecks slide away under the keel of the white ship. Springtime corpses
> caught in the wreckage twist and flow as the Anubis moves by overhead.
> Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that can
> see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde.
>
> Apparently, underslope is a type of earmark:
>
> https://books.google.ca/books?id=ZjjYpBRkB_8C&pg=PA9&dq=
> underslope&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb3ICxpZbQAhUW8YMKHfr5A
> FYQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q=underslope&f=false
>
> Is that the meaning used here?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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