But we get some insight into what Linden is feeling and thinking.
She wants to free her son but she also needs Thomas Covenant. And she hasn’t forgiven herself for the damage that has been done to his mind. He really isn’t whole and she feels responsible.She believed that she would be content if she could find Jeremiah; if she could close her arms around him one last time. She tried to believe that. But it was not the truth. She needed to see him freed from the Croyel. And she would never be content without Covenant. For her own sake she wanted Covenant to be whole, then she might be able to forgive herself. But he was essential for less selfish reasons as well.
TC speaks up and tells us something but what? You cant kill her, She is dangerous, She feels. She sleeps. So who is she? Who is he talking about? Is he just lost in some past or future part of his mind?
Linden decides to go see if she can help the harrow and Im surprised at what the Humbled have to say…
OK the Haruchai have this thing about being self sufficient and have been trying to get her to give up her power since they met her. Now all of a sudden its as if they think that without the staff and ring she has nothing to offer.“What magic do you possess, Linden Avery, that will meet our need? Are you not self-bereft of every vital resource?”
Stave however puts them in their place and together she and Stave cross the chasm to where the Harrow is. On the way across Stave tells Linden that not only is the stone strong enough to support them but also that there is another power there. Something he can sense.
They find the Harrow kneeling and concentrating with the ring at his forehead. He appears to be frustrated and hasn’t been able to figure out how to get past this hazard. They trade barbs and eventually the Harrow allows her to touch the staff and unblocks her from it. As soon as she touches it she is awash with healing and sight. Not just sight but earthsight. The kind that the people of the land have always had. To be able to feel rocks, trees, earth. The right or wrong of things. To taste beauty. To feel color. All the things that have made us all fall in love with this world, this continent that we call The Land. SRD does a great job with the discriptions:
As she sends her percipience outward she sees that they were not really in the dark but that there are tendrils of power going all over the place. A tangle of power. And then she pushed her sight even further and she senses what Stave had sensed. A malignant power and it was sentient, albeit asleep. She then realizes that this bane, this sentient being was the source of Kevins dirt. Somehow ‘she’ supplies the force that formed it. Now that Linden has called it ‘She’, I begin to suspect that this is the same ‘she ‘ that TC was talking about earlier in this chapter.Now everything around her seemed to unfold, to blossom, as though she had stepped into a new dimension of reality. She felt the obdurate antiquity of the rock under her; the sheer age and indifference of the air; the specific stability and limitations of the Hazard; the ponderous downward yearning of the stalactites; the commingled eagerness and submission of water as it gathered and trickled down the gnarled surfaces of the stalactites to fall like streams of time into the extinction of the abyss. She perceived the Harrow’s anxieties and hungers, and Stave’s stubborn strength, as if they impinged directly on her skin
She convinces the Harrow to let her actually hold the staff and he concedes it with her promise to give it back. While she had been talking to the Harrow he kept saying that the answer was in her darkness and rage. But as she gets her staff she realizes that he is very wrong. That the Viles were for millennia beings of beauty.
When she finally starts really looking at the threads she figures out their patterns. She does so by her knowledge of the Viles. Not information but what her ‘sight’ had told her.According to Esmer they lived in caverns as ornate and majestic as castles. There they devoted their vast power and knowledge to the making of beauty and wonder, and all their works were filled with loveliness.
Again we find that someone immersed in Earthpower uses their senses so much differently. And in this case she uses what she knew of the Viles from her meeting with them in the past to see what she needs to know, what threads the move and which one would bring down the forbidding. So she snaps the one tendril that holds it all together. When she does the forbidding falls apart and even the Harrow is awed by what she has done. However he is still what he is and tells her to give the staff back. At once she is enveloped by Kevins dirt.Trusting the taste of sounds, the scent of blackness, the tactile seethe of meaning, she inserted her thread delicately among the tendrils. (snip) She wrapped her thread around the essential strand. As she tightened Earthpower on that strand, she smelled the Harrow’s warnings, tasted the grip of Staves hand.
TC again mentions ‘She’.
As they move forward the Ardent is left behind for last. He is scared to cross the Hazard. Much the same way that TC used to be scared to come down from Kevins Watch. But the will of the insequent makes him cross. He speaks of it as a geas.‘She’s’ going to get bigger. Every time ‘She’ eats. Every time someone who doesn’t know or care how dangerous ‘She’ is comes down here.
And thus ends this chapter
Urged by the Giants, Stave and Liand encouraged her into the Lost Deep.
), the Viles were concerned with beauty, Roger was once a child, and Joan a loving wife and (presumably) mother. How far can this extend? Could Foul have been (as much as his nature allows, any way) 'good'? Is it his imprisonment in time that has driven him to his destructive plans? Is Kassy just another form of Foul in that respect?
