But the mist thickened further still. In this sourceless, shadowless light, even footprints were nothing but thin tracings of blue-white against the greater white of the washed-out world, all but impossible to see with his sore and watering eyes.
They endured a day and a night in the mist: a night they spent in utter darkness, huddled together against the wind, trying to ignore their own mounting hunger and thirst and the cold of the huge thickness of ice beneath their feet, which threatened to suck every scrap of warmth from their bodies.
Doubts assailed Longtusk, suspended here in this harsh fog of ice crystals and mist. How could he have imagined that he could lead a party on such an impossible undertaking? He had only a fragment of legend to inspire him — only his memory of the flight of the birds to guide him. And in this white-out fog, even his acute mammoth senses were baffled by the clamor of wind and the creak of ice under his feet.
They were all in distress, Longtusk realized, for mammoths were not built to endure such long treks over such inhospitable terrain without food and water. It was obvious that the journey was taking a heavy toll on poor Splayfoot; she was sinking once more into that ominous half-consciousness from which he feared, one day, she might not have the strength to climb out.
And Rockheart too was suffering. He was more gaunt and bony than ever, his eyes milky and sore, his tusks protruding from the planes of his face like icicles. He had never looked older. But he wasn’t feeble yet, as he proved as he propelled Splayfoot forward with a mighty shove of his forehead at her rump.
They continued. They had, after all, no choice.
At last, after another half day, the mist cleared as suddenly as it had descended. The world emerged again, reduced to elementals: a flat white surface under a blue dome, nothing but white and blue and flatness, an empty, stripped-bare land across which the mammoths toiled.
…But the landscape was not quite empty.
The Dreamer Willow walked a little way away from the mammoths, blinking in the sudden glare. He peered into the east, and he pulled a strip of rabbit skin around his eyes to protect them from the sun’s glare.
Then he came running to Longtusk, jabbering in his guttural, incomprehensible language, and pointed to the eastern horizon.
Longtusk squinted that way. He could see nothing but a blur where the ice merged with the sky. But that meant little; Willow’s eyes, like a Firehead’s, were those of a predator, much sharper than any mammoth’s.
Nevertheless he felt encouraged, and they pulled forward with increased enthusiasm.
They smelled it before they saw it.
"…Water," said Splayfoot, wondering. "It smells almost warm."
Rockheart, wheezing, walking stiffly, had raised his great scarred trunk. "Growing things. And something else, something sour. Sulfur, perhaps."
Willow was growing increasingly agitated. His bow legs working, he ran ahead of the mammoths and then back, urging them forward.
And then Longtusk saw it.
The mountains, protruding from the ice, seemed to float between blue sky and white ice. Gray-black scree, shattered by frost, tumbled over pure white glaciers — and, etched sharply against the black mountains, he saw pale green stripes that could only be vegetation.
It was the nunatak.
Heartened, trumpeting with excitement, he hurried forward.
Under his feet, rock began to push out of the ice and its thin covering of snow. The exposed rock was rust brown, the color of a calf’s hair. It was littered with loose snow, which was blown by the prevailing wind into white streaks.
For a time walking became a little easier. But the long, steady climb up the shallow rise added to their efforts, and soon they were all breathing hard, the young Cows trumpeting their dismay.
After a time the land began to descend once more. Longtusk found himself walking down a broad, widening valley that curved between rounded, icebound hills. The smooth curving profiles of the hills were barely visible, the blue-white of the ice against the duller white of the sky. But here and there the land was sprinkled with fragments of black rock. The rock made it easier to see the shape of the land around him: the sweep of the valley floor, the tight rounded profiles of the hills.
He came to a piece of the black rock, lying in his path. He nudged it cautiously with his foot. It was frothy, jet black, and sharp-edged — surely sharp enough to cut through the skin of an incautious mammoth’s foot or trunk. He trumpeted a warning.
Now they left the hills behind and the valley flattened out into a wide plain. There was more rock here, he saw: dark fragments scattered across the plain, half buried by the ice. Here and there the fragments were piled up in low unstable heaps. It was as if some giant creature had burst from the land itself, scattering these lumps of rock far and wide.
Now the plain of broken rocks gave way to a broader area, smooth flat ice largely free of the rock lumps. Longtusk guessed they were approaching a frozen lake; rock lumps that fell here must have sunk to the bottom of the water and were now hidden beneath the ice layers.
Cautiously they skirted the lake, sticking to the shore.
But the land here was no longer flat. It was broken by vast bowls, like immense footprints — not of ice, Longtusk realized, but carved out of the rock itself, and coated by thin layers of ice and snow. The mammoths were forced to wend their way carefully between these craters, calling to each other when they were out of sight of one another.
Longtusk wondered what savage force had managed to punch these great wounds in the ground. This was, he thought, a strange place indeed, shaped by forces he couldn’t even guess at.
At last he came to a place where the ground was bare of snow and ice. He walked forward warily.
The ground was warm.
He walked over a gummy brown-gray mud that clung to his footpads; here and there it was streaked orange, yellow, black. The mud was littered with shallow pools of water and rivulets which ran over sticky layers of gray scum. Where snow lay on the ground, he could see how it was melting into the hot pools and streams, folding over in huge complex swathes.
In places the water was so hot it actually boiled, the steam stained a muddy gray by particles of dirt, and there was a sour, claustrophobic stink of sulfur. The steam, curling into the air, formed towers of billows and swirls, pointlessly beautiful. In fact it rose so high it blocked out the sun, like a cloud that reached from the ground to the air, and Longtusk shivered in the cold, reduced light.
He found a place some way from the steaming, active areas. He tasted the water. It was hot — not unpleasantly so — and it tasted sour, acidic. He spat it out.
Nearby was a place where it wasn’t water that boiled but mud, gray-brown and thick. The mud had built itself a chimney, thick-walled, that rose halfway to his belly like some monstrous trunk. The steam here was laced with dark gray dust that plastered itself over the walls of the fumarole. The water had bubbled with a high rushing noise, but the slurping mud made a deeper growling sound, like the agitated rumbling of old Bull mammoths arguing over some obscure point of pride.
…And there was life here.
Lichen and moss clung to the bare rock, and grass, brown and flattened, struggled to survive in swathes over ground streaked yellow by sulfur. The plants were coated with layers of ice — frosted out of the steaming, moisture-laden air — as if the plants themselves were made of ice crystals.
Curiously he reached down and plucked some of the frozen scrub. The ice crumbled away, revealing thin, brittle plant material within; he crushed it with his trunk until it was soft enough to cram into his mouth. It was thin on his tongue, but nourishing.