> It appears to me (and I think I said this before) that people who
> think the places in DP are close together just don't do any cross
> country walking.
Done so in Norway, and I still think the places _are_ close together - compared to Iron Age central Europe. I've also been astonished about some facts about the Creek-Stream River while researching the maps for Whitewall.
Knowing that the Shadow Plateau is a kilometer - 3000 feet - high, I estimated that the Pharaoh's Marsh would have to be some 300 metres - 1000 feet - above Choralinthor Bay level. Following the old bed of the Creek-Stream River, I found this to be on a distance of about 30-40 miles.
In other words: the land rises about 10 metres for every mile you travel on the river.
Let's compare the Rhine at one of its more picturesque places, the Loreley near castle Stahleck (in fact about 10 miles downriver). If the Rhine valley rose with the same rate from the Loreley, in Bacharach it would be almost all the way up to the castle.
People who have been there in years of strong rainfall have been impressed by the current which pushed through at maybe 2 metres difference, and by the effort of the ships going against the current.
We have the report that around 700 S.T. Hrestol Arganitis traveled the Creek-Stream River upriver all the way to Delecti's Ruin, which I estimate at roughly 1000 - 1400 metres above the sea. The lowest passage through the Rockwoods, Trader Valley near Too Far, would be perhaps 1600 metres above the sea. The Greatway Peaks would still rise above the valley as impressively as the Alps over Munich on a very clear day.
These distances _are_ extremely short. The Oslir has maybe 500 miles to descend from Furthest to the Thunder Delta, which gives it an average slope of 2 metres per mile - ten times that of the Rhine at Bacharach. You could probably surf down the Creekstream River...
I haven't done much of river swimming until recently, and I'm a bad swimmer, but even so I found that making a headway against a good current would be difficult to the extreme.
Enjossi's feat of swimming upriver the entire way from Nochet to Kjartan's Pool makes Beowulf's crossing of the Baltic Sea look minimal even if performed on a river like the Rhine. On the Creek-Stream River with this kind of slope...
Even if my elevation numbers are too high by a factor of two (which I doubt), the horizontal distances as published are low.
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