Microscope stories

More histology yesterday - that is, staring down microscopes at bits of animals and people, trying to figure out what it all means. Yesterday was about bones. When you look down a microscope at bones you see this sort of thing:

You can learn quite a lot by sitting and looking at something like this if you have someone knowledgeable telling you what it all means. But if you're like me, especially if it's Friday afternoon, you could instead just make up a bunch of stuff yourself.

For example, that looks more like a map to me. And the pink stuff looks like rivers. So I suppose that it's three rivers meeting at a point, with one river flowing onward. If you look hard, you can see a little fortress built on an island in the Eastern River, connected to the shore by a sandy tidal causeway. Obviously this is the stronghold of the River Pirates, who take a toll from every boat that passes by under view of their guns. They also send out ships to raid up and down the coast. So the river to the left flows out and soon meets the Great Eastern Sea, whereas the others flow in from the north, south and west.

The South River is narrow, so it must be deep and fast. It's obviously coming from the Great Southern Mountains, bringing the icy melted snows from their peaks. The mines of the south are rich in gold and lead, though it's a wild area fit only for rugged and slightly crazed men. The river has many rapids so boats aren't sent on it. Instead, gold nails are hammered into lengths of tree trunk which are then floated down the river to the coast, hopefully to be intercepted by the miners' agents before the River Pirates find them.

The West River is broad and slow. It wends its way across the Great Plains from the Western Cities. Boats and rafts ply their way back and forth all parts of this river with travellers, trade, and diplomats from foreign lands. The Western Principalities protect the larger convoys with flotillas of guards, but sometimes boats fall behind, and then the River Pirates strike! Sometime there is talk of the Princes banding together to eliminate the River Pirate threat, but the Pirates have secret ambassadors amongst all the Western Courts, and each of the squabbling Princes believes his neighbours to be worse affected than himself by the raiding.

You can see that the North River flows through dense forest and jungle. It emerges from the unknown northlands, whence no civilized man has returned. Mysterious vessels occasionally drift down from the north. They are abandoned and half burned shells made from long strips of bone, glued together at the edges in a manner unknown to modern craftsmen. The bones strips themselves are a dozen feet long, prompting wild speculation amongst the sages but little investigation. Although some boats contain the remnants of alien boxes or barrels, the River Pirates leave them all untouched, as they are superstitious and cautious and see no need to draw disaster down upon their shoulders.

There are plenty more stories in the microscope slide boxes. This has been one of them.