The Eye of the World: Chapter Twenty-Nine

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: EYES WITHOUT PITY

As much as I've moaned about the slow pace of this book, and the way I've chosen to read the book, it is really slow, I have to admit that none of the action scenes (so to speak) in the book have really disappointed me. Granted, I'm not much of a judge of action scenes, let along action scenes in books, but still.

The action scene that takes up most of this chapter manages to be different enough from the previous ones to avoid coming across as stale and repetitive. This time around, Perrin, Egwene, and Elyas are being hunted by flocks of hundreds of ravens, and they have to weave through the hills to avoid being detected by the ravens, which they can't outrun. At first I was rather skeptical of ravens as threats, because the horrible movie adaptation of The Dark Is Rising used them (or crows, close enough) to far from terrifying effect.

But thankfully Jordan manages to convey a sense of danger by having the flock of ravens pick apart a fox as if they were a school of piranha. Yes, you read that right, and it's one of the most memorable images in the book so far.

Thankfully Elyas's wolf pack serves as a decent lookout, and they even manage to fight off the killer swarm, though they don't get away unscathed. After a few more tense pages (except for the fact that Elyas says "burn you" instead of "damn you", which distracted me a little), the group finally reaches a stedding, a sort of dead zone which not only repels agents of the Dark One, but disables the magic of the Aes Sedai.

But this isn't any ordinary stedding, not that they're ordinary to begin with. It holds the crumbled remains of giant statue of Artur Hawkwing, who is obviously based on the mythical King Arthur (who I'm sure needs no introduction). But other than the fact that both characters are kings, they actually don't have that much in common, judging by the tale Elyas tells them. In fact, Artur Hawkwing is more like a fantasy Alexander the Great than anything else. He conquered every acre of land on the book's map, only for his kingdom to completely fall apart the instant he died (when said statue was completed, for extra pathos). He also hated the Dark One and the Aes Sedai in equal measure, which makes me wonder if it isn't a coincidence that there's a stedding where his statue was.

All in all, a solid chapter which I'll probably forget about in a month or so.

NEXT TIME: An old face in a new context.