These tiny bits of New Atlantis stood out from the surrounding forest in 
the same way that a vicar in morning coat and wing collar would have in the 
cave of the Drummers. The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not 
adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people 
were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a 
handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling 
slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half 
buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, 
scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels. Stuck 
together properly and built on a rise, these modules might have added up to a 
house of substance, even grandeur; but to Hackworth, riding through the 
territory on his way to visit his family, it was all depressing and confusing. 
Ten years among the Drummers had not affected his neo-Victorian aesthetics. He 
could not tell where one house left off and the next one began, the houses were 
all intertangled with one another like neurons in the brain.