Birnam Wood

Birnam Wood is a Location on Titan in Stanislaw Lem 's Novel Fiasco .

Following are excerpts describing the scenery. They need to be rephrased as currently they are the literal translations from the book.

Thousands of chasms, at least, spewed from narrow outlets, throwing into the poisonous

atmosphere streams of ammonium salts. Ammonium radicals, kept in their free state by the

tremendous pressure of the rocks, shot up into the dark sky, boiling, and turned it into

churning chaos ... 

Dirty-yellow clouds moved slowly and heavily over the whole

Depression, to fall in strange, sticky, ropy snow that stiffened to form Birnam Wood. The

name had been given it because it traveled.

t was not a wood, of course, and only from a great distance did it resemble a forest buried

in snow. The furious play of chemical radicals, continually fed with new material because

the different groups of geysers erupted each with its own incessant rhythm, created a crusty

porcelain jungle that attained heights of a quarter of a mile; the weak gravitation assisted

its growth, so that there were treelike formations and thickets of glassy white laid upon

each other in successive layers, until finally the bottom could no longer support the

endlessly climbing mass of lacy branchings and collapsed with a slow, grating clatter, like

a planetary china shop leveled in an earthquake.

From close up, this forest of Titan looked like a transitory construction, a thing of lace and

white foam,...

the enormous bulk was actually a solidified cloud formed of spiderweb capillaries

in every shade of white, from pearly opalescent to dazzling milky.

... one never knew when the section one was in would reach the limit of its

strength and crumble, burying the traveler beneath a several-hundred-meter layer of

pulverized enamel, which was light as fluff only in a small spray. ...

indicated its presence by the white glow from that direction, as if the

sun were about to rise there.

The forest, seen from above, seemed a cloud flattened on the ground, a cloud

whose entire surface unaccountably swelled and crawled.