"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

The last book I read that started with a hanging was Ken Follett's "The Pillars of the Earth". (Didn't finish that one.)

Neal Stephenson could have plotted the first chapter along the Freedom Trail:

• Boston's a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes.
• The colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable front barns.
• ...a new burying ground, which for some reason they have situated hard by the granary.
  
• (Charlestown/Newtowne) puts Enoch strongly in mind of another swampy, dirty, miasma-ridden burg full of savants: Cambridge, England.
  

Historical/scientific/linguistic facts I think I can take at face value:

• "I explained... why it was a Bad Idea to land on Sir Isaac's Shit List - by your leave, by your leave-..."
• A couple of leather fire-buckets dangle by the entrance, in accordance with safety regulations, and a bootjack hangs on the wall so that the innkeeper can take his guests' footwear hostage at night.
  
• On Sir Isaac Newton's temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties.
• ... long stanchion-mounted oars, minting systems of vortices that fall to aft, flailing about one another, tracing out fading and flattening conic sections that Sir Isaac could probably work out in his head. The Hypothesis of Vortices is pressed with many difficulties. {Now this is way too late in the day to find out about Metaweb!!}