Four days later they came to the mouth of a great serpentine chasm that angled off to the northeast, toward the place where earth and sky met. Its steep walls, forbiddingly vertical, were shining like gold in the midday sun. “The Viper Rift,” said the Vroon. “It runs three thousand miles, or somewhat more, and its depth is immeasurable. There’s a river of green water at its bottom, but I think no explorer has ever been able to climb down those mountain walls to reach it.”
And then a place of trees with long, many-angled red needles that sang like harps in the breeze, and one where boiling-hot streams came pouring down out of a cliff a thousand feet high, and a district of vermilion hills and purple gullies bridged by glistening spider-threads strong as powerful cables, and one where the scarlet energy of a tireless volcano rushed with a great roaring whoosh far up into the sky from a triangular rupture in the ground.
All very fascinating, yes. But this territory was vast and empty. In much of it a terrifying silence ruled. Dantirya Sambail could be anywhere in it, or nowhere. Did it make sense to continue his seemingly hopeless pursuit? Prestimion began to give some consideration to turning back. It was irresponsible of him to go on and on for mere curiosity’s sake, when vital tasks awaited him at the Castle and this quest seemed ever more unlikely to meet with success.
But then, at last, unexpectedly, came some word of the fugitives:
“Two men on mounts?” a phlegmatic flat-faced villager said, in a shoddy little town that sat square in a crossroads between two highways that bore no traffic at all. Maundigand-Klimd had found him. He seemed to take the fact that a Su-Suheris had suddenly manifested himself in his remote town utterly for granted; but evidently he took everything utterly for granted. “Oh, yes, yes. They came this way. A tall lean man and one who was older and heavier. Ten, twelve, fourteen days ago.” He pointed toward the horizon. “Heading east, they were.”
East. East. Always east.
But the east seemed to go on forever.
They rode on. It was, at any rate, a lovely district to be traveling in. The air was clear and pure, the weather mild, the winds gentle. The soil looked fertile. Every day’s sunrise was a golden-green delight. But there were only the tiniest, most forlorn towns out here, each one dozens of miles from its neighbor; and the inhabitants stared in amazement at the sight of well-born travelers venturing among them in a procession of glossy floaters bearing the starburst crest.
It was almost unthinkable, Prestimion told himself, that after all the thousands of years of human existence on Majipoor there should be such near-emptiness out here, not very many weeks’ journey east of Castle Mount. He knew that great tracts of central Zimroel were still unoccupied; but to see this silent realm of immense open spaces virtually in the shadow of the Mount—that was unexpected, and strange. And humbling, too. It taught one, once again, the meaning of size. Even after all these thousands of years of human settlement, the vastness of Majipoor was such that ample room for expansion still remained.
Surely this region was one that could be usefully developed. A project for the future, Prestimion thought. As though he did not have enough before him already.
The road they were following, a broad, straight highway, veered slightly to the south now, though it still ran predominantly eastward. The few villages were even farther apart, here, tiny collections of strawroofed huts with scruffy kitchen-gardens around them. Green meadows and forest gave way to the dark blur of wilderness to the north and a line of rocky blue hills in the south. Straight ahead, still, lay a grassy land of streams and small lakes, quiet, peaceful, inviting.
But there was evidence that this place was not altogether a bucolic paradise. Flights of big dusky-winged raptorial birds often passed by high overhead—khestrabons, they were, or perhaps the even larger and fiercer surastrenas—with their long yellow necks at full extension and their beady eyes hungrily taking in all that lay below them. Now and again, far in the distance, they could be seen swooping down by twos and threes as though to snatch up some hapless migratory creatures of the ground. There were some fearsome insects here, too, beetles twice the size of thuvna eggs, with six horns an inch long on their heads and black armor spotted with sinister blotches of red covering their wings. An army of them, half a mile in length, came marching five abreast along the edge of the road one morning, making a terrifying clacking sound with their huge beaks as they advanced.
“What are these things called?” Gialaurys wanted to know, and the Vroon replied: “Calderoules, they are. Which in the dialect of eastern Alhanroel means ‘poison-spitters’—for they’ll throw fiery acid at you out of spouts under their wings from ten feet away, and woe betide you if any of it touches your lips or nostrils.”
“I think this pretty place is less charming than it looks,” observed Abrigant, with a hiss of displeasure, and Prestimion had word sent to the floaters behind theirs in the convoy that no one was to set foot outside of his vehicle until they had left these insects well behind them.
As for the plants in this region, they were like no plants Prestimion and his companions had ever seen. Confalume, when he was Coronal, had been deeply interested in botany as in so many other things, and Prestimion had often strolled with him through one or another of the glass-roofed garden-houses that the older man had caused to be built at the Castle, admiring the strange and wonderful plants that had been collected for him in every part of the world; and in time something of Lord Confalume’s passion for horticultural curiosities had passed to him. At Prestimion’s request, Galiel-ber Dorn put names to as many of the plants they were seeing now as he could: these are moonvines, this is gray carrionfurze, that low stubby weed is mikkusfleur, that is barugaza, this with the white trunk and fruit like globes of green jade is the kammoni tree. Perhaps the Vroon was inventing the names as he went, perhaps they were the true ones; but after a time even he could name them no more, and replied with a shrug of his many tentacles whenever he was asked to identify some curious specimen spied by the roadside.
Yet he still knew the names of the natural features they were passing. There was a surprising place that he called the Fountain of Wine, where, he said, creatures too small to see carried out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin, and a geyser sprayed the product of their labors into the air five times a day. “You would not want to taste it, though,” the Vroon warned, when Gialaurys expressed an interest.
And then, the Dancing Hills—the Wall of Flame—the Great Sickle—the Web of Jewels—
The miles fled behind them. Days went by. Weeks. Ever eastward ran their course, the Mount now beginning to drop from sight to the rear of them, no villages at all along the way any more, nothing at all to be seen except broad fiat fields of grass, each of a different color: a great swath of topaz grass, then one where the jutting blades were deep cobalt, and then claret, indigo, creamy primrose, saffron, chartreuse. “We must be coming to the Great Sea,” Abrigant said. “Look how low the land lies here. And only grass will grow, as though the ground is a sandy swamp. The sea can’t be very far off.”
“I doubt this very much,” Gialaurys said gruffly. He had long since lost all appetite for continuing this expedition, which had come by now to strike him as a foolhardy if not downright impossible endeavor. Gialaurys looked questioningly toward the Vroon. “The sea’s a year’s journey from us yet, if it’s a day. What do you say, little one?”
“Ah, the sea, the sea.” Galielber Dorn made a small percussive sound with his beak, the Vroonish equivalent of a smile, and gestured vaguely toward the east. “Far, yet,” he said. “Very, very far.” And soon the last of the grassy savannahs was behind them and they were in a district of purplish granite hills, not in any way resembling a coastal landscape, which gave way to a dense forest of rich black soil where big bright globular fruits of some unknown kind clung to every bough of the thick-leaved trees like golden lamps in a green night.