The River, the Roads, and Who Is Asked Anything

Everything in Sarrum descends from one accident of water, and the accident is soon told. The Sarr rises in the chalk west of the county, runs roughly north to south, and turns navigable at the very point the city stands on; there is no other reason for a city here, nor was there ever. Above the Long Wharf the water is clean and is drunk, and it carries down the barges with stone from the Deepcut and coal from the southern pits. Below Scour Lane it takes the fulling waste, the dye liquor, the tannery run-off and the drainage of a population nobody has counted, and goes on its way grey, warm in summer, and death to drink. Nobody drinks it. Nobody swims in it. The fish trade sells nothing caught within four miles below the city, and what the water costs in the dead is the first fact about health here; the drinking water comes from elsewhere entirely.