Birnam Wood
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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.