Cryptonomicon

"Who's the wretch?" Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he-men. Waterhouse already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.

"Hakh!" blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. "He is from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose."

"Of course."

This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not walking it, but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion sickness.

"Hakh!" the driver says, when they are about three-quarters of the way up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. "They practically laid out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings. There are probably Germans over there now!"

"Speaking of bile," Waterhouse says, "I need you to pull over. I'll walk from here."

The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.

Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. "You will," Chattan said, "have to work out a modus vivendi."Once Waterhouse had looked this term up, he agreed heartily.

The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier place such as the Scottish Highlands.

The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can't even reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced something like "skerries"), the frisky, bright-eyed, long-tailed mammals that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while inconvenient, will be good for security.

Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto vocetones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and supplies. The heart of the device is a hand-blown spherical glass jar comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The fumes get into Waterhouse's lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He staggers out of the room for a while.