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Schwarza Falls

Written by Douglas W. Jones

1

To: Grantville Emergency Committee.
From: John Sterling, Edgar Frost and Francis Kidwell.
Date: May 30, 1631? fifth day after the disaster.
Re: Road options around Schwarza Falls.

Yesterday, May twenty-ninth, the fourth day after the disaster, we went up Buffalo Creek to the power plant to look into how to build a road connection over the border into the lands to what is now the southwest. You asked us to tell you everything, even if we weren't certain it was important, so pardon us if we ramble a bit.

I. The Situation

The report from the power plant is correct. There's a real castle up there looking down on us. Don't imagine a fairy-tale castle. This is a deadly serious looking fortress. There's also a bit of a village there, or at least half of one. The village and the castle are both named Schwarzburg. We need to make friends with whoever runs the place, because they're guarding our southwest flank very nicely. And, if their cannon are even mediocre, I doubt there's much we could do to stop them from wiping out the power plant.

As you come around the bend in Buffalo Creek, about a mile out from Grantville, what you see is a wall of black rock, streaked with red, green and brown. This castle sits on a hill dead center on top of it, right above the power plant. The cliff has a mirror polish on it that reflects the sky when you get close enough. We guess that from the bottom of the Buffalo Creek valley up to the floor of the valley above, it must be three hundred feet. Our ridge tops are about four hundred feet above the valley floor, but the hills of the land we've been plunked into are much higher. We guess about twice as high, which means eight hundred feet up from the valley floor. The German hills aren't as chopped up as ours. They seem a bit rounder, but the valley walls are steep enough.

There's a stream in the valley we cut into. They call it the Schwarza, and where it flows over the cut edge, there's quite a waterfall. We'll call it Schwarza Falls. It's hard to guess how high it is, because it's pounding down on what was a steep slope and washing quite a bit of that slope downhill. We figure it's a clear fall of at least fifteen feet, but then it tumbles down at least two hundred feet before it flows into what used to be Spring Branch.

If it hadn't been for the fact that the Schwarza valley is offset a bit from Buffalo Creek valley, there'd be no hope of getting a road up that cliff. As things stand, though, the Schwarza had a loop to the northeast that got lopped off by the disaster. (We're starting to call it the "Ring of Fire," by the way, since that seems a pretty good description of the disaster—"RoF" for short.) The ridge to the north of Buffalo Creek just manages to come up to that part of the Schwarza's stream bed. Also, just southwest of Schwarza Falls, there's a little knob on our side that just goes up to the level of the rooftops of some houses nearby. It's all that's left of the ridge that divided Spring Branch from Buffalo Creek.

One thing is real clear. That little village at the top of the falls is in big trouble. Half the place is gone. Calling it a village may be too generous; it was a cluster of houses and barns built beside a bridge across the Schwarza. In a few places, the ground collapsed as far back as thirty feet from the edge, taking houses and barns if they happened to be there. There's quite a mound of muck and rubble along the face of the cliff below those places. There's one barn, though, that's standing right on the edge and hasn't moved an inch.

The cut-off chunk of the Schwarza northeast of the castle must have dumped its entire contents and a good part of its riverbed over the cliff in one great gush. There's a flow of debris from there down along what used to be Spring Branch Creek. It looks like what was left of Spring Branch Road inside the ring of fire was pretty well buried or washed out within a few minutes on Sunday. The culvert over Spring Branch Creek on the main road looks like it survived that first gush, but it was never intended to take the flow of the Schwarza river, so the road is acting like a dam. The water was over the road when we got there. It's a few inches deep and running fast, but the road is pretty flat so the overflow is spread over quite a distance. It's eating at the road, and we think it'll wash it out unless we dig up the culvert and put in a proper bridge.

We waded across and took a hike up what's left of the ridge that divided Buffalo Creek from Spring Branch. It's the steep but direct route into what's left of the lower Schwarzburg village. They were watching us the whole time, and there's no doubt that they were as nervous about us as we were about them. By the time we got up the hill, a guy named Franz was there to meet us, with two others who stayed back a bit and whose names we didn't get. Franz seemed to be an officer in the guard of the castle. As near as we could make out, his boss is the graf of Schwarzburg and a town named Rudolstadt.

Franz turned out to be a decent fellow and pretty quick witted, but he had some big pistols in his belt and a sword. We were careful not to put our hands anywhere near our holsters those first few minutes. We'd better send someone official to Schwarzburg quickly, someone who knows German!

We read Franz the message you wrote for us in German about wanting to open the road connections across the border of the "ring." After we gave him the letters you gave us, we tried to have a conversation. I wish we knew more German, but the stuff you gave us helped a lot. With lots of mistakes, hand gestures and an occasional picture on a notepad, we managed to get by.

He told us that the Ring of Fire destroyed the road from Schwarzburg to Rudolstadt where, as near as we could make out, his boss lives most of the time. It also destroyed the road to the town of Saalfeld. As a result, it seems that we're in agreement about trying to open up a road connection.

The bridge across the Schwarza at Schwarzburg is right at the lip of the falls. It's in serious danger of collapse because of all the dirt that's been washed away from the foundations. If the bridge goes, the farmhouses that are left on the southeast side of the Schwarza will be cut off, so they're already working on a temporary wooden bridge upstream from the old one. Timber is one thing they have plenty of. The roads here are mostly grass and packed dirt, with cobblestones only where erosion is likely to be a problem.

Northeast from the falls about two hundred yards, the road is almost cut off with half of it slumped away. It looks like it was right on the riverbank there, at the southeast end of the loop of river that the Ring of Fire sliced off. Beyond that, to the northwest, the road is in good shape, with stone retaining walls in places as it takes a long switchback up the slope to the castle gate.

We didn't go into the castle, but we did go up to the square by the gate where there's a bit of an upper village. The castle sits along the crest of a knife-edge ridge with the Schwarza river wrapped around the west, south and east sides. You couldn't ask for a better defensive position, but it's not all that big. The castle must be a quarter mile long but the ridge isn't very wide anywhere.

II. Road Proposals

Franz, the officer, must have been thinking about the problem of getting a road down from Schwarzburg, because he took us to the jumping off point where a new road could connect. He pointed out the route he thought would work before we left to walk down that way. We agree with him, so we'll describe that route and forget the others.

Be aware, we're not engineers, just three guys who've had plenty of experience building and maintaining roads. We're confident that we can do this job, and do it well, but under the laws of West Virginia, we aren't really qualified. It would be nice if there was a civil engineer to help with this project.

The road would turn north just east of the old Spring Branch road and traverse up the east side of the Spring Branch valley. This would almost follow the power company right of way once the power line gets on the same side of the creek. Then, the road would turn broadly around the head of the valley to meet the northwest end of the abandoned riverbed of the Schwarza. The climb up out of the riverbed would be short, and we'd meet the road up from the lower village about a quarter mile northwest of the waterfall.

We figure this would be about four thousand feet of road climbing three hundred feet, so the grade should be under eight percent. On the walk down, we flagged the path we followed while using a pocket clinometer to try to keep our path at seven percent. That brought us out a bit on the high side, but those flags should make charting the path back up pretty straightforward.

We figure that a crew with a medium dozer and a couple of chainsaws could carve a temporary one-lane road up to Schwarzburg along the Spring Branch route in about a day. That's about two hours at half a mile an hour for the first pass of the dozer to cut the roadbed, or about two hours, and then three more passes to shape the crown at a mile an hour, make that three hours. That's five hours of an eight hour day, but it's fair to budget the whole day to allow for the unexpected. There's some decent timber along the way we ought to try to salvage while we're at it.

There's so little watershed above our proposed route that a temporary road like that could last a few years, we think. But with another day of work to put in about five culverts, we could make a road there that would last. We think at least two of the old culverts along Spring Branch Road can be recovered with a winch and some digging, so someone should inventory culverts we can salvage from elsewhere.

With three days work and several truckloads of crushed rock, we could make the new road meet county standards for unimproved roads, which is something none of the roads we saw up on top manage to do. Two days of this would be to widen the road to two lanes, and one day would be to put down the rock and grade it nicely. If we put in the culverts soon enough, the road widening can wait until the traffic demands it.

We noticed that the power plant has a Caterpillar D6. They use it for pushing coal around. We asked about it at the front gate, and the guard there phoned the plant manager, Bill Porter. The upshot is, the power plant is willing to loan the dozer to the county for a day's work. They think that anything we can do to get the folks in that castle on our side would definitely be a good idea.

III. Defense

Finally, you asked us to say something about defending our new borders. If the folks who run Schwarza castle fail to block invaders, or if they decide to attack us, we could defend this end of the valley from the ridge northeast of Spring Branch. That would let us look down on our new road from about two hundred yards and we'd look across at the steeper slope down from the lower village from a distance of about four hundred yards. The castle would have an altitude advantage on us, but the ridge would offer cover and we could dig bunkers into the ridge top. You might want to put a jeep trail up to there from the valley behind the ridge.

The other defensive position would be on the ridge top across Buffalo Creek southeast of the power plant. This would look straight down our new road from a range of six to twelve hundred yards. Again, a bunker would be handy, but the castle hasn't got a good shot at this position because the chopped off hillside southeast of the castle is in the way. The big threat here is from snipers sitting right on the edge of that hillside, but the ground slopes down steeply to that cliff edge, enough so they wouldn't be able to hide behind the terrain. It looks steep enough that they'd have to worry about sliding right over the edge if they slipped.

John Sterling has the most military experience of any of us. He says he'd put mostly snipers on the ridge above Spring Branch, along with a few mortars or RPG launchers, and he'd put the light artillery on the south. Do we have any weapons heavier than hunting rifles? All in all, we agree that we'd much rather defend Grantville from Schwarzburg Castle. Seen from Schwarzburg, it looks like the cliffs do a good job of blocking all access to Grantville for over a mile in either direction, perhaps more. The castle is the strong point that covers both paths into the valley.

IV. Other

Franz told us that there were people in some of those houses that went over the edge. We had trouble communicating about this, but I get the feeling there might be ten bodies somewhere at the bottom of the cliff. We said that he was welcome to send people down to try to find the bodies, and we said that we would try to get people to help.

2

To be delivered to Ludwig Guenther, Graf of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt, or in his absence, to the head of the guard at Rudolstadt:

Your humble servant, Franz Saalfelder, officer of the guard at Schloss Schwarzburg, begs to report again on the strange events of these last few days.

I do not know that you received my first report of the events of Sunday, the fifteenth day of May, but the scout sent from Rudolstadt on that day arrived here on Tuesday, having worked his way to Schwarzburg along a very difficult route. God willing, he will have completed his circuit and returned to Rudolstadt by now with even more to report.

Sunday, the fifteenth day of May, at around noon, the very earth seemed to shake with the roar of thunder. The guards on the east-facing battlements were blinded for a moment by a wall of light that seemed brighter than the sun but as brief as a lightning flash. Fortunately, your humble servant was not looking that way at the moment, but the roar was horrible even indoors.

What devilment it was I cannot say. At first, I was sure that the very pits of Hell had opened, for all of the land to the north and east of Schwarzburg had disappeared. Where the valley of the Schwarza and the road to Rudolstadt had been, there was nothing but a pit, hundreds of feet deep, with a strange country on the bottom. Half of the houses and barns beside the Schwarza were gone in an instant, and some of the flat land beside the river fell over the edge shortly after, taking another house and two barns.

We cannot say for certain how many people were lost when the pit opened, but it cannot have been less than ten. It is fortunate that it was a Sunday and many had yet to leave the castle where they had attended chapel services that morning. Those who hurried home to fix their Sunday dinners were the victims, while the lazy who stayed to talk were saved. Fortunately, most of the refugees fleeing the mercenaries who have lately been a plague on the Saale valley have been moving on up the Schwarza into the well protected villages beyond Schwarzburg. Some of the survivors from the lower village want to go down into the pit to look for bodies so that they can have a proper burial. We can see wreckage of some of the houses that slid over the edge of the pit just after the pit opened. There may be bodies among the wreckage.

The scout you sent followed the north and west rim of the pit on his travels from Rudolstadt to Schwarzburg. He tells me that it is not entirely a pit because in some places the mountains of the strange new land within overtop our valleys. Of more import, the pit appears to be a near perfect circle, several miles in size, reaching from the edge of the valley of the Saale all the way to Schwarzburg. God willing, you will have heard his report by the time I write this.

Our chaplain cannot say whether this strange occurrence is the work of the Devil or not. His advice appears as sound as it is trite, to hope for the best while preparing for the worst. We have posted guards to report on what is within. Day and night, I have been called to the battlements or to the very edge of the pit to witness the strangest of events.

The land within the pit is occupied. There are houses of strange construction there. The strangest is a great brick building not far from the edge below Schwarzburg. At first, I thought the building was a fortress, for it is great enough to be one. Now, I believe it to be some kind of mill or forge, for they have a great pile of what looks like charcoal outside the building, and there are great smokestacks, although there is now no great amount of smoke. Immediately after the blast and blinding flash that created the pit, this fortress or mill was emitting a loud roar of noise that went on and on, loud enough to block out all else, and horrible. Great clouds of white smoke or steam rose from the mill and ceased when the noise ceased. Since then, it has been quiet, except for an occasional puff of steam and an occasional strange noise.

There are roads within the pit that look finer than any road I have ever seen. They are wide enough everywhere for two wagons to pass, smooth and well drained, with broad ditches to each side to carry away the rainwater. What is most terrifying is that they have wagons that appear to move as if by magic, sometimes faster than a horse can gallop and with nothing to pull them along. Watching from the castle and from the edge of the pit, we can see that the people within are not pleased. To them, they are within a great stone wall with few escapes, and we have seen groups of them looking up and pointing in our direction from the great mill. Their roads once went beyond the walls of the pit, perhaps. There are lines of strange towers leading away from the great mill to the north and south that support ropes made of wire. Where the Schwarza pours over the wall into the pit, it has created a new river that is flowing over one of their roads and will soon destroy it. The same new river also threatens to topple one of the strange towers.

There are two places near Schwarzburg where the hills within the pit come up to the level of the ground outside. One is just south of the bridge across the Schwarza below the castle, and one is to the northwest where the road used to turn east along the north bank of the Schwarza. We sent scouts into the pit that way with orders to stay hidden and to leave no sign of their passage. They report that there is a town several miles into the land where two valleys meet and that there are also smaller villages. There are even churches, or at least buildings that look like churches, with steeples surmounted by the symbol of the cross. This gives our chaplain some comfort.

The scouts reported many strange things. They have found twisted wire fences that must be many miles long, with sharp barbs of cut wire twisted onto the fence wire. The quality of the wire was very good, but in many places, they report that it was rusted, as if nobody ever took the time to care for it. All of the houses they spied out were very strange, constructed more of sawn wood or brick than of stone and plaster, and well painted. At night, many of the houses are lit up like daylight, with lights brighter than hundreds of candles. Even barns that are old and run-down have too many windows glazed with large panes of the most perfect glass anyone has ever seen. The towns, and even some houses outside the towns, have hellishly bright lanterns mounted on poles overhead so that people can move about at night just as freely as they do in the daylight.

Today, Thursday the nineteenth of May, three men from within the pit came up the hill. We met them at the bridge over the Schwarza, and I must report now what we learned in talking with them, or in trying to talk, for it was difficult.

These men were dressed most outlandishly. Even from the castle, even when they had not yet begun to climb, that much was evident. Each man wore a yellow helmet and an orange vest; the orange color was unnaturally bright. As they came closer, it was apparent that they wore blue pantaloons, cut very close and exceedingly well made but well worn and with the color faded. Under their orange vests, they wore well cut shirts, and each man wore a belt from which hung several things. All three men wore what must have been pistols, very small ones, but arms, nonetheless.

After we tried to talk, one of the men let me try on his helmet. It was very light compared to what I expected, not metal, but something much lighter and yet harder than leather. The helmet did not rest on the head, but was supported away from the head on a clever network of straps. I feel that a blow to the helmet would not be felt directly, not with those straps in place.

They also saw that I was curious about the implements on their belts. One of them showed me a most remarkable knife. It was small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, but it could be unfolded to reveal a knife blade, a file, a pair of pincers, and several other kinds of picks and implements, perhaps ten in all. Not only the blades, but the handle itself had the look of the finest silver, and yet it was as hard as the finest steel.

They speak English, it seems, and a little French, very little. Unfortunately, we have no English speakers in our garrison. They came prepared knowing that we spoke German, with a message written in German that they read to us and with a remarkable letter that they gave to us, which we include with this message. There are many things we would have spoken of if we had been better able to communicate.

Their message confirmed that the town in the middle of the pit is called Grantville. My spies had reported signs within that said "Welcome to Grantville" on the roads outside the town, so this was not entirely new to me. I remain puzzled why an unprotected town would post signs saying welcome, if indeed that is what the signs say.

At first I thought the name Grantville sounded French, but their message explained that they are from a land called West Virginia in the United States of America, that they came from hundreds of years in the future, and that they have no idea how or why they are here. The message also confirmed my guess that their appearance in the pit has caused a crisis. They say they are governed by the Grantville Emergency Committee, clearly not a proper government and certainly not the government of this West Virginia or United States.

Their strange clothing and tools certainly suggest that they are not from our world, but their letter is dated Wednesday the twenty eighth of May, 1631. From this, I gather that they are using the Catholic calendar of Pope Gregory and that they have already communicated with someone on the outside of the pit.

The men's names were John Sterling, Edgar Frost and Francis Kidwell. They printed their names in Roman letters on a piece of paper that they gave to me and that I enclose with this message. Each of the men had a small book of blank sheets of paper cleverly bound with a spiral piece of wire, and each man had a pen of some strange kind that did not need an inkpot. They used them freely, drawing pictures when they did not know the words.

These men were well educated, able to read fluently even when they were reading German, a language they obviously spoke very poorly. I am being generous; they spoke almost no proper German but only some words. All three were also able to write quickly and well. This is why it took me a while to understand that they were not military men, nor were they ambassadors. Rather, they saw themselves as simple laborers, charged with but one job, that of finding the best way to build a road from the bottom of the pit up to the road at Schwarzburg. Of course, that is what their message said, but appearances can deceive and then deceive again.

I asked these men about the dead who had fallen into the pit, and this was a difficult question, both because of the language and because, I think, it was outside their authority. They said that we were welcome to send a burial party into the pit to recover the bodies, and they said that they would try to send help. I believe that they were sincerely troubled by the deaths.

Without being able to ask your leave, but knowing how important it would be to reestablish the road from Schwartzburg to Rudolstadt, we gave them permission to survey a route for connecting our roads to theirs. They will certainly not be using any new road without our leave, because Schwarzburg castle is perfectly placed to guard any road they can build. Their message did say that the road would be open to us, and that we would be welcome to use it to travel through Grantville to reach places to the north and east.

We had already been discussing the problem of a road into the pit among the guards, since we are worried about how to get food supplies up ...