Cryptonomicon

At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world's tiniest and most poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute to wartime austerity?); a heap of sallow dirt with a shovel in it; and another mannequin (a recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.

Waterhouse found a worm-eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianain a bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient, sui generistongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiananever uses the English words "wool" and "guano" except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers who apparently dominate the world's commodity markets. Waterhouse had to read the encyclopedia almost cover-to-cover and use all his cryptanalytic skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.

Having learned so much about them, he is fascinated to find them proudly displayed in the heart of the cosmopolitan city: a mound of guano and a woman dressed in wool (9). The woman's outfit is entirely grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of the ensemble is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made of felt. A closer look reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep are the evolutionary product of thousands of years' massive weather-related die-off. Their wool is famous for its density, its corkscrewlike fibers, and its immunity to all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted effect which the Encyclopediadescribes as being supremely desirable and for which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.

The third theme of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianais hinted at by the mannequin with the gun.

Propped up against the stonework next to the building's entrance is a gaffer dressed in an antique variant of the Home Guard uniform, involving knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased in formidable socks made of one of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee, with tourniquets fashioned from thick cords woven together in a vaguely Celtic interlace pattern (on almost every page, the Encyclopediarestates that the Qwghlmians are not Celts, but that they did invent the best features of Celtic culture). These garters are the traditional ornament of true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their suits. They were traditionally made from the long, slender tails of the Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the Encyclopediadefines as "a small mammal of the order Rodentia and the order Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting primarily on the eggs of sea birds, capable of multiplying with great rapidity when that or any other food is made available to it, admired and even emulated by Qwghlmians for its hardiness and adaptability."

After Waterhouse has been standing there for a few moments, enjoying a cigarette and examining those garters, this mannequin moves slightly. Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over in a gust of wind, but then he realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling over, but just shifting its weight from foot to foot.

The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and utters some word of greeting in his language, which, as has already become plain, is even less suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.

"Howdy," Waterhouse says.

The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English. He concludes that his interlocutor was saying, "What part of the States are you from, then?"

"My family's done a lot of traveling around," Waterhouse says. "Let's say South Dakota."