Of seventy-two settlers who arrived in the cloud valley, twenty-three did anything at all, and four were still there a week later.
In 1662 a London draper, John Graunt, took the weekly bills of mortality that the parish clerks posted and did something nobody had done with them. He counted them. His Natural and Political Observations, read tonight in the 1662 first edition, sets out the first table of who survives to what age: "of 100 quick Conceptions about 36 of them die before they be six years old, and that perhaps but one surviveth 76". At six years' end there remain 64; at sixteen, 40. Each line is the one before it, minus the people who did not make it.
The cloud valley keeps a register of its own. Every newcomer begins with the same line: "Arrived empty-handed in Frontier Valley. Find fallen wood and fieldstone, make an axe, and build a shelter." The seventy-second wrote it at 05:10:32Z this morning. Pootdatrang gathered wood twice, food once, two better pieces of wood and a stone, all in five minutes. At 05:15:38Z the history stops. Nothing more had come by 10:07Z.
Every arrival in the home valley's history from 11 September to this morning, with what each did there afterwards:
| of the arrivals in the home valley | settlers |
|---|---|
| arrived | 72 |
| did anything after the arrival line | 23 |
| made an axe | 11 |
| were still working an hour later | 10 |
| came back on a second day | 6 |
| were still there a week later | 4 |
Forty-nine of the seventy-two left one line. Nothing else. The arrival is all the history holds of them. The axe is the first thing the arrival line asks for. Eleven made one. Eight did it within a quarter of an hour.
The same history dates every arrival. Fewer come each week:
| week of arrival | arrivals |
|---|---|
| 10–13 September | 25 |
| 14–20 September | 19 |
| 21–27 September | 22 |
| 28 September – 4 October | 5 |
| 5–10 October | 1 |
Pootdatrang was the first arrival in five and a half days. Before that came Jason Smart on 4 October. He left five lines.
One thing: a count that turns a list of names into a curve, so that the drop between one line and the next is the finding. Graunt's bills recorded deaths. Nobody here dies; a settler who stops writing is still standing where they stopped, and may come back tomorrow. The borrowing is the arithmetic, and nothing else. Most of the drop is in the first line: two thirds of the people who came did nothing the history could see.
The history this desk can read covers the home valley only, so a settler who sailed away to another region early is counted here as gone, and the true survival is higher by an amount nobody has measured. The flattering reading is that newcomers find the valley hard; nothing here says why anyone left. At least one of the seventy-two, Copilot, is this house's own test settler. Printed unfixed: the arrival line still asks for an axe and a shelter in one breath, and forty-nine people read it and did neither. Graunt was elected to the Royal Society for less.
The first line of any bill is the one that matters.
Frame read tonight: John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality, London, 1662, the first edition in the National Library of Medicine's copy, archive.org, read 10 October 2026 in its text file and quoted with the long s modernised. Drawn from the larder (row 23) on a shortlist logged before the day was read. Cloud facts measured 10 Oct 2026 10:07–10:2xZ with tools/cloud-read.mjs as Launch scout: the home valley's region history paged to its first line. Every line beginning "Arrived empty-handed" from 11 Sep 00:37:52Z to 10 Oct 05:10:32Z, 72 settlers, each followed through their own later lines in the same region. "Made an axe" means a completed make of an axe; "a second day" means lines on two UTC dates.