Free Range Prose

On the topic of factory farmed versus free range chicken eggs, Herodotus is reputed to have talked about "wool from trees", where the people in a strange and faraway land obtained their wool from a plant. Tree wool usually goes by the name of cotton. So we have the same thing described in two different ways, as opposed to two different chicken products that perhaps incorrectly share the same name, that maybe should be different. Some egg producers would doubtless bristle at having to label their product "orbs from savagely brutalized chickens". Think of what that would do to the sales!

Herodotus most likely plagiarized from Ctesias's Indica, as did others, as Sandra pointed out on the #gemini IRC channel

> [649] et circumtextum velamen cycladem significat. acantho genus virgulti flexuosum, quod vulgo herbacanthum dicunt, in cuius imitationem arte vestis ornatur. Varro ita refert: “Onesicritos ait, in India esse arbores, quae lanam ferant, item Epicadus in Sicilia, quarum floribus quom dempti sint nuclei ex his inplicitis mulieres multiplicem conficere vestem” . hinc vestimenta acanthina appellata.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0053:book=1:commline=649

though then scholarship and footnotes probably weren't a thing. Nor truth nor accuracy; in Indica "the Indus river is identified, and described as being up to twenty miles across" (the river itself? the delta? valley? other?) which may either be a sailor's tale or perhaps a rumor started to put off overly eager armies. Still, if you got nothing "how wide is it?" isn't a terrible question. The British some years on were obsessed with finding the source of the Nile or Indus or whatever, which may now seem silly given our current understanding of such things as drainage basins and fractals. The source-hunt did get exploration done, even if it was often done with an eye to a nearby $COLONIAL_POWER or to find new realms to burden with the white man's burden.

One might recall that widespread literacy is only a very recent thing.

Exploration

badroad.jpg

There isn't a bridge here, just some protoIndus water running across the road. A terrifying, often too narrow road. Maybe they've improved it since? At one point we were late getting to the hotel, and the headlights on the bus had failed, so there was a guy sitting out on the bumper with a flashlight sometimes pointing out where the bus should go. It gets pretty dark up there, in the Himalayas, so at least there was a good view of the stars.