The mammoths rambled ahead, but the two humans stopped and shielded their eyes with their hands. As their vision acclimated to the change in light, they looked at their surroundings through narrowed eyes. They had emerged from a gap in a low bluff and were at the edge of a natural bowl several hundred yards across. The mammoths hungrily grazed the short grassy vegetation that covered the bowl's floor.

“This is quite amazing,” Karla said. “These creatures have adjusted to two worlds: one of darkness, the other of light. They are miracles of adaptation as well as anachronisms.”

“Yes, very interesting,” Schroeder said in a disinterested voice.

He wasn't being rude, only practical. He realized that they were far from safe. Their pursuers could be on their heels. He scanned the wall of massive, blackened boulders surrounding the natural basin and suggested that they make their way to the perimeter to look for a way out.

Karla was reluctant to leave the herd of mammoths, but she climbed with Schroeder up a gradually ascending hill to the edge of the boulder field. The rocks ranged in size from some as big as cars to others nearly as big as a house. They were tumbled in heaps more than a hundred feet high, in some cases. Some of the massive rocks were piled so tightly together that it would have been impossible to slip a knife blade between them.

There were openings in the rocky ramparts, but the breaks only went in a few feet or yards. As they made their way along the impenetrable wall, Karla became discouraged. They had escaped the fire only to wind up in a very large frying pan. Schroeder, on the other hand, seemed to have been revived by the fresh air. He ignored the pain his ankle, his eyes darting along the face of the wall. He disappeared into a gap, and after a few minutes let out a yell of triumph.

Schroeder emerged from the opening and announced that he had found a way through the barrier. He grabbed Karla's hand as if he were leading a child, and they plunged into the mass of monoliths. They had only gone along the path a few steps when a man stepped out from behind a boulder. It was Grisha, the leader of the murderous ivory hunters.

NUMA 6 - Polar Shift

31

AUSTIN LOOKED DOWN into the yawning caldera as the paraglider soared like a condor through the notch in the rim. The road they had been following up the side of the volcano went through the low spot and descended a gradual slope to the midpoint of the caldera, where it ended in a low bluff. On the opposite side of the crater, the rim dropped almost vertically to a boulder field at the bottom. A patch of green roughly shaped in a circle was sandwiched between the bottom of the slope and the field of black boulders.