The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [362]
Brecie was tempted to ask Ayla if she really did have a son like Rydag, then changed her mind. The subject was just too sensitive.
As they continued to head north over the next few days, a distinctive change came over the landscape. The bogs disappeared and, once they left the noisy birds behind, the sound of wind filled the treeless open plains with an eerie, wailing silence and a sense of desolation. The skies became overcast with a dull gray, featureless cloud cover that obscured the sun and hid the stars at night, but it seldom rained. Instead, the air felt dryer, and colder, with a sharp wind that seemed to sap even the moisture from exhaled breath. But an occasional break in the clouds at evening vanquished the dull monotony of the heavens with a sunset so glowing, and so brilliant as it reflected off the moisture-laden upper skies, it left the travelers without words to describe it, daunted by its sheer beauty.
It was a land of far horizons. Low rolling hill followed low rolling hill, with no jagged peaks to lend distance and perspective, and no reed-green marshes to relieve the endless grays, browns, and dusty golds. The plains seemed to go on forever in all directions, except toward the north. There the vast sweep was swallowed by a dense misty fog that hid all signs of the world beyond, and deceived the eye about the distance to it.
The character of the land was neither grassy steppes nor frozen tundra, but a blend of both. Frost and drought-resistant tufted grasses, herbs with dense root systems, miniature woody shrubs of sagebrush and wormwood mingled with white arctic bell heather, miniature rhododendron, and pink crowberry flowers dominating the dainty purple blooms of alpine heath. Blueberry bushes no more than four inches high promised, nonetheless, a profusion of full-sized berries, and prostrate birch crawled along the ground like woody vines.
But even dwarfed trees Were scarce with two sets of growing conditions opposing them. On true northern tundra, summer temperature is too low for germination and growth of tree seeds. On steppes, howling winds, that absorb moisture before it can accumulate, sweep across the landscape, and are as much a prohibiting factor as the cold. The combination left the land both frozen and dry.
Landscape even more bleak greeted the band of hunters as they pushed toward the thick white fog ahead. Bare rock and rubble was exposed, but it was covered with lichens; clinging scaly crusts of yellow, gray, brown, even bright orange that seemed more rock than plant. A few flowering herbs and miniature shrubs persisted, and the tough grasses and sedges covered sizable patches. Even in this wild, dreary place of cold dry winds that seemed incapable of supporting life, life went on.
Clues began to appear that hinted at the secret hidden within the mists. Scratches etched into large slabs of rock; long ridges of sand, stones, and gravel; large stones out of place, as though dropped from the sky by an invisible giant hand. Water washed across the stony ground, in thin streams and gushing cloudy torrents, with no discernible pattern, and as they drew closer cold moisture in the air could at last be felt. Dirty snow lingered in shaded nooks, and in a depression beside a large boulder, old snow surrounded a small pool. Deep within it were shelves of ice of a rich and vivid shade of blue.
The wind shifted in the afternoon, and by the time the travelers set up camp, it was snowing, a dry, blowing snow. Talut and the others were conferring, disturbed. Vincavec had Called to the Mammoth Spirit several times to no avail. They had expected to find the great beasts before this.
At night, lying quietly in her bed, Ayla became aware of mysterious sounds that seemed to be coming from deep within the earth: grindings, poppings, chortlings, gurglings. She couldn’t identify