by Mick Harper » 11:02 am
Extract Fifty-Seven
In fact there is a choice of experts. One model is the ‘lock-keeper’s cottage” solution. Since travellers turn up at any time of the night or day, the post has to be manned twenty-four hours a day which means somebody permanently there who, though with light duties, is obliged to turn out at any time. The duties, which consist essentially of saying “Winchester to your left, Avebury to the right” are certainly light but living there does entail providing the chap (or as pointed out in the witches section of The Megalithic Empire, more likely a beldame) with a house.
A fairly expensive option since, it would appear, that to ensure that this traveller reaches this intersection it will be necessary to ‘man’ all intersections between Canterbury and this point. The alternative is to dispense with the house-and-garden and employ three people on eight hour shifts which is presumably why lock-keepers' cottages are a preferred solution.
Except of course there are no lock-gates so why not dispense with the people altogether and employ avian signposts? It is remarkabley easy to teach crows to talk and indeed the entire Crow Family (the corvidae) appear to have traits that would seem to indicate that they have somehow acquired over the millennia a usefulness to the Megalithic System that goes a little bit further than the usual human-bird interchange of sharing milk bottles with blue tits.
The ability to talk is one of these corvidian traits, and to talk with somewhat more discrimination than is the case with other less gifted bird species that can merely parrot. Hence to train a corvid to fly down, perch on a conveniently sited post and say, “Winchester to your left, Avebury to the right” is not a difficult solution to the lock-gate problem.
Nor an expensive one from the Megalithics' point of view since the bird will not say a thing until the traveller has provided a bit of bird-food. Actually the exchange could be rather profitable for the Megalithic operators since for some unfathomable reason corvids have a penchant for taking gewgaws and hiding them in a safe place. This behaviour is not, as it is with birds in the wild, either to impress mates or to store food for hard times, so one can only conjecture that the behaviour has been induced by some other agency than nature. Collecting tolls is all in a day's work.
And talking of remarkable traits, corvids can recognise individual human beings after an absence of seven years so one really wouldn’t recommend trying to get away without paying.
One hesitates to wonder whether a corvid could train its own offspring to take over the family business but it is certainly the case that technically one bird could operate a number of posts over a particular area. But ‘crows’ have other long-distance attributes that Megalithics might find useful. They have the weird habit of laying out stones in straight lines and get mighty irritated when these are interfered with. It would seem that laying out leylines by using aerial assistants rather than chain-boys and surveyors on the ground is a definite possibilty.
But of course laying out pebbles at sea is not a sound option so here the birds will be put to rather different uses.
