THE ENTIRE COUNTRY SEEMS WARM to me . . . in particular the eastern limb. Hooke might throw accusations carelessly, but not words. Among men who peered through telescopes, 'limb' meant the edge of a heavenly body's disk, such as the moon's crescent when it was illumined from the side. Setting out to the northeast the next day, Daniel glanced at a map of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk and noticed that they formed a semicircular limb, bounded by the Thames on the south and the Wash on the north, and in between them, bulging eastwards into the North Sea. A bright light kindled above the Hague would shine a hundred nautical miles across the sea and light up that entire sweep of coastline, setting it aglow like a crescent moon, like the alchemist's symbol for silver. Silver was the element of the Moon, the complement and counterpart of the Sun, whose element was gold. And as the Sun King was now pouring much gold into England, the possible existence of a silvery lunar crescent just to the north of London had import. Roger had no patience with alchemical suppositions and superstitions, but politics he knew well.