All the month of November, Mason and Dixon run the East Line, 11 miles, 20 Chains, 88 Links from the Post Mark'd West in Mr. Bryant's Field, now mark'd East as well,— eastward to the shore of Delaware, from which the five degrees of Longitude in the original Grant were to extend. It is a task they might have sub-contracted out to any of dozens of local Surveyors.
"Industrious Pair," speculates Capt. Zhang. "Unless you be, rather, jealous, to possess the Line in its entirety."
"As who would not?" Dixon replies. "Five degrees. Twenty minutes out of a day's Turn. Time enough for all sorts of activities,— eat the wrong Fish, fall in love, sign an order that will alter History, take a Nap...? A globe-ful of people, and not one is ignorant of the worth of twenty minutes, each minute a Pearl, let slip, one after the next, into Oblivion's Gulfs."
"Or twenty-one minutes, if you add another Quarter of a Degree," twinkles the Chinaman, "Crossing Ohio, as you might say. It was five and a Quarter Degrees that the Jesuits remov'd from the Chinese Circle, in reducing it to three hundred sixty. Bit like the Eleven Days taken from your Calendar, isn't it? Same Questions present themselves,— Where'd that Slice of Azimuth go? How will it be redeem'd? Perhaps your five Degrees of Visto were meant to be a sort of.. .Repository?"
The Surveyors exchange Grimaces. What now? Can he be serious? Have they another fictitious Spaniard in the Offing? "Wouldn't each Degree simply've been widen'd by just a hair, to make up for the loss?" Dixon gently, in a voice Mason has heard him use with pack-horses that the Killogh brothers, their Pack-Men, vouch are "daft." "So that in some way, so should I imagine, congenial to the Oriental Beliefs...?, thy missing Degrees are distributed indistinguishably thro'out the Entirety of the Circle...?"
"And what may that slender Blade of Planetary Surface they took away, not be concealing?" Zhang dementedly on, oblivious, "— twenty-one minutes of Clock-Time, and eleven Million Square Miles,— any?thing may be hiding in there, more than your Herodotus, aye nor immortal Munchausen, might ever have dreamt. The Fountain of Youth, the Seven Cities of Gold, the Other Eden, the Canyons of black Obsid?ian, the eight Immortals, the Victory over Death, the Defeat of the Wrath?ful Deities? Histories ever Secret. Lands whose Surveys will never be tied into any made here, in this Priest-tainted three-sixty,— blue Seas, as Oceanick Depths, call'd into Being by Mathesis alone...without Shores, nor any but their own Weather blowing in from no-where upon the official Globe—
"Nor ought we to be forgetting the Heavens,— as above, so below!— Stars beyond numbering, Planets unsuspected, Planets harboring Life! Morally Intelligent Life! an extra sign of the Zodiack, tho' of course run?ning a bit narrower,— yet might it stretch out North to South, perhaps even all the width of the Semi-Circle,— a Dragon? a Pennsylvania Rifle? a Surveyors' Line?"
"Am I content with this? Was that your Question, Dixon?"
"Ah didn't say anything...?"
"Of course you did. You were muttering over there, I heard it."
"Happen I may have audibly wonder'd, how one with so much Invest?ment in the matter of the Eleven Days, could be much offended when the Hysteresis be express'd in Degrees...?"
"And taken at the correct Scale," declares Captain Zhang, "what is there to choose? both are Experiences of that failure of perfect Return, that haunts all for whom Time elapses. In the runs of Lives, in Company as alone, what fails............