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Bonus Material Hector's Semaphore System
Pulling a chair up to the table, Hector sat
down and tapped on the drawing. It had seemed like such a good idea.
Towers with movable metal arms could be set up across the desert between
Kaal and Purespring, the closest settlement at the desert's edge. The arms
had many different positions, each corresponding with a letter of the
alphabet. The first tower moved the arms to send the desired message.
Someone at the second tower saw it through the telescope and fixed its
arms to relay the message on to the next and the next, so within a few
minutes important information could travel from Kaal to Purespring. Hector grimaced and licked his cracked dry lips. Everything was dry out here in the desert. Sun and sand and more sand, and only a little water in a few places. That had been Shem's main objection to the semaphore system. No water for the operators while they sat in little buildings across the desert waiting to send the messages. Too hot, and no water. (On earth the French Chappe brothers
designed an implemented a semaphore system like this which was used by
Napoleon Bonaparte.) |
