This day’s journey was rougher and more protracted. They left Mount Hood behind early and moved into high desert country where the landscape was bleak and empty and the road frequently disappeared beneath sand and scrub. Flat stretches were interspersed with hummocks and ravines, with dry washes and ridges so rocky that they looked like dragon spines. The country was volcanic, dotted with cinder cones and awash in cinder dust and lava rock. Cactus littered the terrain in vast clumps; everything else that grew was stunted and wintry and edged with thorns or razor-sharp bark. He drove the AV around and over and through it all, letting Trim show him the way, keeping clear of places where the sand and grit looked uncertain, as if covering sinkholes and crevasses that might drop him into a black pit. Sometimes, he found himself navigating through ravines so deep that he could not see beyond the rims save for where the sky domed overhead. He had to trust to Trim in those situations, unable to determine with any accuracy even which direction he was going. Everything took a long time, and the hours rolled by without any noticeable progress. One section of the land looked pretty much like another. Off to the west, distant and remote, the chain of the mountains stretched parallel to his drive, their dark barren peaks cutting sharply against the sky, their rock a wall that locked away whatever lay beyond. There was an alien quality to those mountains that reminded him of his encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Rockies, and he found himself hoping that he would not have to go into them in order to find the Elves. Elves. He thought about them the way he thought about the spirits of the dead—as insubstantial as smoke, as ephemeral as mist. He could not put faces to them, could not give them features, could not imagine their place in the world. Memory of the dead faded with time; of Elves, there were no memories at all. He might try to believe in them, but it would take an encounter with one to make them come alive. He stopped and ate once during the day’s long drive, pulling off into a barren flat where the horizon stretched away into tomorrow. The emptiness was depressing, a warning of the world’s future. He tried not to think about that future, about what the Lady had told him, but he might as well have been trying not to think about eating and drinking. It was an unavoidable presence in his life, a reality that rode on his shoulders like a weight.