Excerpt from The White Desert

Long moments of throbbing echoes; then the car appeared, a mile or so down the canon, twisting along the rocky walls which rose sheer from the road, threading the innumerable bridges which spanned the little stream, at last to break forth into the open country and roar on toward Dominion. The drowsy gasoline tender rose. A moment more and a long, sleek, yellow racer had come to a stop beside the gas tank, chortled with greater reverbera tion than ever as the throttle was thrown open, then wheezed into silence with the cutting off of the igni tion. A young man rose from his almost fiat posi tion in the low-slung driver's seat and crawling over the side, stretched himself, meanwhile staring up ward toward the glaring white of Mount Taluchen, the highest peak of the continental backbone, frowning in the coldness of snows that never de parted: The villager moved closer.

Gas? Yep. The young man stretched again. Fill up the tank - and better give me half a gallon of oil.

Then he turned away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, al most desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as a knife thrust, between the region where trees may grow and snows may hide beneath their protecting boughs and the desolate, barren, rocky, forbidding waste of timber line.

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