It seemed as though many great rivers, or one great river which had shifted its channel repeatedly, had coursed through the land over endless ages. Eroded cliffs, gaunt escarpments, high and low plateaus and buttes were the up-and-down features of the terrain. Grey gravel crunched under their feet, and then there was grey sand and then smooth grey pebbles, which were hard for feet to find a purchase on, rolling and sliding. This gave way to wide beds of coarse red sand and beyond that the red sand was finer and then their trudging, stumbling feet sent up clouds of red dust which bit into nostrils and throat. The way led between huge black boulders beneath beetling black cliffs and nut-sized black pebbles graded slowly into seed-sized grains of black sand which hissed beneath their feet. After a while there were streaks of gold in the blackness, and then streaks of blackness in the floor of golden sands. Black and white and gold and black and red, over and over again. But of the river or rivers which had, ages after ages, rolled and roared and ground and eaten into the tortured surface of the land, eaten their way deeper and deeper, eaten the rock into gravel and the gravel into sand, washing away every trace of soil, leaving not even a pocket of true earth — of these mighty and age-long waters, not a drop remained.
