Slowly his eyes adjusted to the glare and his head calmed down. He found he could stand, look around him, and see the landscape for what it was.

He stood on a rocky slope that rose from the edge of the desert toward the mountains. A monstrous, incandescent sun poured light and heat out of a sterile blue sky. The mountains lay to the west, the desert to the east.

The desert began about five miles to the east and nearly a mile below Blade. It stretched away toward a distant flat horizon, patches of gravel alternating with patches of sand. Blade saw gulleys that must have been carved by water, but no vegetation, let alone birds or animals. In the clear air the horizon was a good thirty miles away-two days travel, for a man taking it easy and saving moisture. Every one of those thirty miles looked dead, dry, and sterile. It would be too much of a gamble heading out across the desert, Blade decided. He'd have to reach water within three days. That was as long as he could hope to last in this sun-baked land. Then he would die. In a few more days after that his body would be a withered husk. In a few months the sand would have buried him, or perhaps stripped the flesh from his bones so that only a bleaching skeleton would remain to greet travelers.

There seemed to be nothing out there worth risking such a fate. If the ground at his feet had been sprouting man-eating tigers and poisonous snakes, perhaps Blade would have thought differently. But it was only bare rock, sullen gray streaked with black and brown, cracked and flaked by thousands of years of sun, and at the moment almost too hot to stand on. To the west rose the mountains, and Blade turned to study them more closely.

The nearest peaks leaped up to at least ten thousand feet. Farther away Blade could see more peaks rising to twelve and fifteen thousand feet, with white snowcaps blazing from their summits. Still farther off he could make out the white wall of a magnificent triangular peak soaring up to at least twenty thousand feet. A plume of snow trailing from its summit hinted at strong winds high aloft.