Although it was the third tallest in the Great Land, the hill was not very steep, and Qama had every confidence that Perens would be able to climb it with at most two stops to recover and catch her breath. Near the summit the ground was rocky, but there was just enough grass and moss to let occasional visitors sit in some kind of comfort.
The lack of deep soil made it impossible for anything as large as a tree to grow, so the view was clear in all directions. Since the southern part of the island was narrower than Luxalia, the ocean was visible to the east and west, though if there were any fishing boats on it they were too small to be seen from this distance. The water was calm, and most of it reflected the blue of the almost completely clear sky. The western horizon was marred by dark clouds above a nearly opaque haze, suggesting a fierce storm which, however, passed the land without coming close to it.
To the south, the land dipped for a few hundred paces, then rose steadily again towards two mountains and, between and slightly beyond them, the unclimbable cliffs which brought the Great Land to an abrupt halt. Among the handful of scientists who had studied the area, there was a tentative consensus that the cliffs marked the point where a still larger mountain had somehow become detached many generations ago (presumably before even the earliest writings, since none of them mentioned it), but no mechanism for this had yet been proposed, and other hypotheses of varying credibility were also discussed when there was nothing more important to talk about.
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