“You dream,” said Noim Condorit. “You live in fantasies.”

“One could wish,” I replied, “for warmer encouragement from one’s bondbrother.”

Noim was ever a pessimist; I took his dourness in stride, and counted the days to Salla’s Gate. When we reached it, I was unprepared for the splendor of the place. All morning and half an afternoon we had been following a thirty-degree grade up the broad breast of Kongoroi Mountain, shrouded in the shadow of the great double summit. It seemed to me we would climb forever and still have Kongoroi looming over us. Then our caravan swung around to the left, car after car disappearing behind a snowy pylon on the flank of the road, and our car’s turn came, and when we had turned the corner, I beheld an astonishing sight: a wide break in the mountain wall, as if some cosmic hand had pried away one corner of Kongoroi. Through the gap came daylight in a glittering burst. This was Salla’s Gate, the miraculous pass across which our ancestors came when first they entered our province, so many hundreds of years back, after their wanderings in the Burnt Lowlands. We plunged joyously into it, riding two and even three cars abreast over the hardpacked snow, and before we made camp for the night we were able to see the strange splendor of the Burnt Lowlands spread out astonishingly below us.

All the next day and the one that followed we rode the switchbacks down Kongoroi’s western slope, creeping at a comical pace along a road that had little room to spare for us: a careless twitch of the stick and one’s car would tumble into an infinite abyss. There was no snow on this face of the Huishtors, and the raw sunpounded rock had a numbing, oppressive look. Ahead everything was red soil.