“What do they eat when they can’t find tourists?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked.

“Humpless camels, or boar, or anything else dead they spy,” Radnal said. “The only reason there aren’t more of them is that the terrain is too barren to support many large-bodied herbivores.”

“I’ve seen country that isn’t,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son said. “In Duvai, east of Lissonland, the herds range the grasslands almost as they did in the days before mankind. The past hundred years, though, hunting has thinned them out. So the Duvains say, at any rate; I wasn’t there then.”

“I’ve heard the same,” Radnal agreed. “It isn’t like that here.”

He waved to show what he meant. The Bottomlands were too hot and dry to enjoy a covering of grass. Scattered over the plain were assorted varieties of succulent spurges, some spiny, some glossy with wax to hold down water loss. Sharing the landscape with them were desiccated — looking bushes — thorny burnets, oleander, tiny Bottomlands olive plants (they were too small to be trees).

Smaller plants huddled in shadows round the base of the bigger ones. Radnal knew seeds were scattered everywhere, waiting for the infrequent rains. But most of the ground was as barren as if the sea had disappeared yesterday, not five and a half million years before.

“I want all of you to drink plenty of water,” Radnal said. “In weather like this, you sweat more than you think. We’ve packed plenty aboard the donkeys, and we’ll replenish their carrying bladders tonight back at the lodge. Don’t be shy — heatstroke can kill you if you aren’t careful.”