Anathem

Part 8

The drive south went fast. We did it in four days and three nights. We were almost out of money, so we camped. Yul cooked our breakfasts and suppers. We saved our money for fuel and for lunch, passing through the mass-produced restaurants and fueling stations like ghosts.

During the first day or so, the landscape was dominated by endless tracts of fuel trees, relieved by small cities surrounding the plants where they were shredded and cooked to produce liquid fuel. Then we had two days of the most densely populated territory I had ever seen. The landscape was indistinguishable from that of the continent where we had started: the same signs and stores everywhere. The cities were so close that their fauxburbs touched one another and we never saw any open countryside, just pulsed along the highway-network from one traffic jam to the next. I saw several concents. They were always in the distance, for they tended to be built on hilltops or in ancient city centers that great highways swerved to avoid. One of these, by coincidence, happened to be Saunt Rambalf. It was built on an elevated mass of igneous rock several miles wide.

I thought about harrowing. When Alwash had used that word on me back on the ship, I’d thought it was funny. But after what had happened in Mahsht, I really did feel harrowed. Not in the sense of a weed that had been pulled out and burned, but in the sense of what was left after the harrowing had been finished: a plant, young, weak, survival still uncertain. But standing alone and alive, with nothing around it that might interfere with its growth or that could protect it from whatever blasts came its way tomorrow.

Late on the third day the landscape began to open up and to smell of something other, more ancient, than tires and fuel. We camped under trees and packed away our warm clothes. Breakfast the fourth day was made from things Cord and Yul had purchased from farmers. We drove into a landscape that had been settled and cultivated since the days of the Bazian Empire. Its population had, of course, waxed and waned countless times since then. Lately it had waned. The fauxburbs and then the cities had withered, leaving what I thought of as the intransigent strongholds of civilization: wealthy people’s villas, maths, monasteries, arks, expensive restaurants, suvins, resorts, retreat centers, hospitals, governmental installations. Little stood between these save open country and surprisingly primitive agriculture. Tufts of scrawny, garishly colored businesses sprouted at road-junctions, just to keep the riffraff like us moving, but most of the buildings were stone or mud with slate or tile roofs. The landscape became more sere and open as we moved along. The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.

Late on the fourth day we came over a little rise and beheld in the distance a naked mountain. Mountains for me had always borne dark green pelts, shaggy with mist. But this one looked as though acid had been poured on it and burned off everything alive. It had the same structure of ridges and cols as the mountains I was used to but it was as bald as the head of a Ringing Vale avout. The pink-orange light of the setting sun made it glow like flesh in candlelight. I was so taken by its appearance that I stared at it for quite a while before I realized that there was nothing behind it. A few more such mountains rose beyond it in the distance, but they rose from a flat and featureless geometric plane, dark grey: an ocean.

That night we camped on a beach beside the Sea of Seas. The next morning we drove the vehicles down a ramp onto the ferry that took us to the Island of Ecba.