It took us several hours to get around the mountain, which I reckoned to be double the girth and a third again the height of any other mountain we had traversed. I had been thinking about the Beforetimers and wondering why they would go to the trouble of building roads and paths in the mountains of what Jacob had scribed of as a remote region in the Beforetime, when I became aware of a soft rumbling sound. It was not the deep-throated rumble of rocks falling, and I was still trying to puzzle it out when the road curved around enough for me to see a ribbon waterfall dropping into the narrow chute between the mountain I was on and the next in the range.

I was no longer surprised to see that the ledge road continued around the next mountain but when we were close enough to feel the spray from the fall, Darga pronounced the water clean, and Maruman decided that we would stop to drink and eat something. As if this were a signal to the natural world, the sun at last cleared the eastern peaks and even as I dismounted and unburdened Gahltha, red-gold light speared down in great bright shafts that soon dissolved the obscuring haze to leave a breathtakingly clear view of mountains rearing up grey and black under a sparkling pale-blue sky. Looking back the way I had come, I saw that a veritable wall of mountains marched northward out of sight, blocking any view of the sea beyond the west of the Land, the highest peaks shining white with snow. This was the spine of high peaks that ran down the centre of the range and I was glad to have turned my back on them, for I had been dreading the possibility that I would have to climb them. It was these same mountains that had stopped me seeing the Beforetime road when the Agyllians had carried me to and from the stone pinnacles that were their eyrie on the western side of the range. Turning east, I noted that another line of peaks ran from south to north, and though nowhere near as imposing as the snow-capped mountains behind me, they were high enough to block any view I might have had of the terrain beyond the mountains.

Directly north from where we were, the mountains were lower, save for one or two truly massive peaks that dwarfed the rest, and there were long connected ridgelines as well as one dark swathe that might be a canyon or even a slender valley. It was impossible to be sure because, while the sun fired all of the peaks, it could not reach the deeper places that yet lay in shadow.