"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

Jack had a lively episode getting lost in some mountain in Germany and running afoul with the witches. Once again the author's fascination with caves and mines comes to the fore.

<Commerce and other astonishment: >

• the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it.
• Farmers whose stables were filled, not with horses, but with painters - young men from France, Savoy, or Italy who sat before easels making copy after copy of land- and sea-scapes and enormous renditions of the Siege of Vienna.
• It was so infested with shipping that there seemed to be not enough water left to float a nutshell. 
• their escape from Germany (as that mess of Duchies, Electorates , Landgraviates, Margraviates, Counties, Bishoprics, Archbishoprics , and Principalities was called)
• Remote islands and continents splayed on the parchment like stomped brains.
• Faulbaum, the Germans said, meaning "lazy and rotten tree." They were alders.
• ... was a runny nose compared to a river

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