As the sun sets, we come to a rise and get our first clear look at the interior. The land below us is flooded with dark purple dusk, while the pink and orange light of the setting sun still shines around us up here. Above the duskline the sun shines between me and the ground, sheeting it, so that the light hides the ground on its far side. Makemin’s face is coated with a shock of sunset light, like a transparent, hot mask of glowing red gelatin. The sun is setting closer than the horizon, looks like a dome protruding from the clouds; the cloudline to the north is a long grey sabre blade with its keen side to the indigo of the upper sky.

We camp along the path, before dimming blue dome and a cloud floor. No moon rises. We crouch in the fluttering air, wind thrashing soundlessly in our clothes, and eat sullenly. The stars come out. The clouds below erupt in a distant flash that brings Makemin to his feet not far from me. There is no noise of thunder and so it takes a while to realize we are seeing lightning below the stars. Makemin stalks back to his letters, weighted down by rocks on his portable writing desk. His little fume light burns behind me, projecting his shadow past me and out into the air over the valley below. I fall asleep with white violet and blue spots flickering in the grey in front of me.

*

Our descent, the next day, is steady and swift. We make our way down the slope toward a foaming ocean of clouds. By midday we are already on gently declining land, the foothills, and the tepid, seeping fog has covered us over. The ground is littered with lumps of broken mortar, evenly laced with fine slivers of rusted metal like long grains of red rice. We pass something like a massive stump, but, examining it, I find it’s the severed end of a cable, ten feet across, protruding from the ground. Hairlike wires festoon the disrupted earth at its base, as if they had sprouted and grown down into the soil like vines.

A wind blows back the fog. While it hangs in a sheer wall ahead of us, the sky over and behind us is clear, silky blue. Again I see the rare sun, slipping along the edge of that cloud wall, wisps passing invisibly between us causing its light all but imperceptibly to vary. The ground is levelling out more and more, and we are approaching a low flat space that is weirdly colored, all pale green with a little blue, and glinting sharply. It’s like a field of translucent, thin-hued gems. We will have to cross it.