To Cuxhaven, the summer in deceleration, floating on to Cuxhaven. The meadows hum. Rain clatters in crescent swoops through the reeds. Sheep, and rarely a few dark northern deer, will come down to browse for seaweed at the shore which is never quite sea nor quite sand, but held in misty ambivalence by the sun. . . . So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas. Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret, not any more. Just as well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at theleast real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight horizons. They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, dx and dy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact--it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, dx by dy, flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a while, and go away: in their shadows children with hair like hay are playing Himmel and Hölle, jumping village pavements from heaven to hell to heaven by increments, sometimes letting Slothrop have a turn, sometimes vanishing back into their dark gassen where elder houses, many-windowed and sorrowing, bow perpetually to the neighbor aross the way, nearly touching overhead, only a thin lead of milk sky between. [Gravity's Rainbow, V567]