The Umbrarium
exchange
The Shadow Exchange: a domed hall at the centre of the night quarter, its trading floor ringed by a gallery of two hundred brass lamps, every one licensed and numbered. Here shadows are entered, quote...
exchange
The Shadow Exchange: a domed hall at the centre of the night quarter, its trading floor ringed by a gallery of two hundred brass lamps, every one licensed and numbered. Here shadows are entered, quote...
market
A lane of stalls under the arcades behind the Umbrarium that opens at dusk and closes at the first grey, where lesser shadows are bought and let by the night. Each stall is a white canvas screen with ...
vault
Beneath the Umbrarium, down a stair of ninety steps, run the vaults in which pledged shadows are kept: long brick corridors, whitewashed, each with its own lamp set at the same height and angle, so th...
college
A narrow old house above the Wall of Hours, five floors of reading rooms where the Readers are trained to see depth in a stain and grain in a shadow. The ground floor holds the tracings: ten thousand ...
chapel
A plain hall of whitewashed brick at the centre of the Rows, with no windows and no lamp, and a square opening in the roof the size of a door. For twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes of the day i...
guild hall
The guild house of the Lamplighters, who hold the lamp right of Gnomon: a square building of ochre stone with a foundry at the back where lamps are cast and an oil cistern beneath the court. In the lo...
hostel
A long low dormitory along the bottom row, where the pledged sleep: ninety cots under a tin roof, a stove, a table, one unlicensed lamp that the Wardens have put out eleven times and that is always li...
workshop
A walled yard at the end of the lane behind the Wall, with a roofed workshop along one side: here stains are removed from houses on a Court writ, lifted whole onto plaster panels, repaired, and, if no...
construction site
On the bare top of Mirror Hill, on a scaffold of timber as high as a church, a bowl of polished bronze is being built segment by segment: sixty metres across when finished, eleven segments in place, e...
customs post
Where the road from elsewhere ends: a stone post as tall as a man on the dry shore below the plateau, a brass lamp on its head that has not gone out in living memory, and beside it the Keeper's lodge ...
sundial tower
A tapering tower of ochre stone twenty-seven metres high, square at the base and knife-edged at the top, built for one purpose: to cast the shadow by which Gnomon tells the time. Around its foot the p...
cutting table
A slab of white marble the length of two men, standing on eight stone legs under a square canopy of bleached canvas at the north edge of the Field. This is the only place in Gnomon where a shadow may ...
court
The eastern arcade of the Field, walled in and roofed over a century ago: a long hall with a single tall window at the west end so that the afternoon sun enters along the floor. At the east end stands...
monument
The old south wall of the town, four hundred paces of ochre render along a lane where for six centuries people have sat in the evening sun: and the wall remembers them. Thousands of stains lie on it, ...