We passed a lone mesquite tree, its roots deep, squeezing some hidden drops of moisture out of the rocky ground. The only living things I saw were a few brown lizards and a golden tortoise Frodo pointed to, harassing him until I called him off. I decided the tortoise deserved some credit for defying the odds and surviving where he had no right to.

The only rises in the desert were mounds of formless slag, surrounded by oily black ooze that emitted foul fumes.

Once in the flatlands I couldn’t see the chasm. I began to wonder if my eyes had played tricks on me up on the mountain. If it was really there, and we were this close, I’d surely be able to see it, wouldn’t I?

I looked in the distance at the shining city. I stared at it, feeling my heart ache when it shimmered out of sight even for a moment and feeling revived when it reappeared. What was it really like there? I had to know. Nothing else mattered.

We camped for the night. The tents were with David and Victoria, wherever they were, so we slept under the stars … except there were none. Which was strange because there didn’t appear to be a cloud cover, though in the desert it was hard to be sure of what I saw.

That night I heard no sounds except wolves howling in the far distance and creepy screams I decided must be peacocks. I felt tense and uneasy, relaxing into a smile only when Frodo, inspired by the wolves, lifted up his snout and cut loose with a heartfelt but pathetic howl.

In the morning we’d journeyed only a few hours when I began to smell something foul. The loathsome stench invaded my nostrils and gripped my stomach. Something terrible was in the air. Crook-necked vultures and some unfamiliar birds of prey, hoary and weathered, circled above. They peered down expectantly. I couldn’t escape the feeling that this vast stretch of land had fed their morbid appetites for millennia. Were we their next meal?

Suddenly I stopped dead and blinked my eyes. What had appeared to be level land stretching out into the distance was the very thing I’d seen from the mountaintop and hoped was an illusion—it was a vast chasm stretching out farther than I could see, with white rocks scattered around its edges. I should have been prepared for this, but it was very different viewing the chasm from a distance than seeing—and smelling—it at its edge.