You could stay in one place all day, from dawn to dusk-Zabriskie Point, say, or the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells-and with each ten-degree rise and fall of the sun, the colors of rock and sand hills changed from dark rose to burnished gold, from chocolate brown to purple and indigo and gray-black, with a spectrum of subtler shades in between.

It had been almost a year since he’d last been to the Valley. Much too long, but it had been a difficult year-the still-painful memories and the dying marriage and a heavy workload at Unidyne. He’d been alone on that last visit, as he was alone now; alone on the last dozen or so desert trips. Even before Timmy’s death, Geena had refused to come with him anymore. She’d never much cared for desert country, actively disliked Death Valley, and she’d used Timmy as an excuse: he was too young, there were too many hazards, he was better off at home with her. After the accident, she hadn’t needed an excuse anymore.

Well, he preferred being alone. Had always had loner tendencies, even during his stint in the army and the good early years with Geena before and after Timmy was born. The Valley was a place made for loners. You could share it only with someone who viewed it in the same perspective-not as endless miles of coarse, dead landscape but as a starkly beautiful wilderness teeming with life. To him it seemed almost sentient, as if deep within its ancient rock was something that approximated a soul.

He’d taken his time deciding where to go first on this trip. The Monument had more than three thousand square miles, second only among national parks to Yellowstone, and all sorts of terrain: the great trough of the Valley floor, with its miles of salt pan two hundred feet and more below sea level, its dunes and alluvial fans, its borate deposits and ancient borax works, its barren fields of gravel and broken rock, its five enclosing mountain ranges packed with hidden canyons, petroglyphs, played-out gold and silver mines, ghost towns.