The left-hand side of North America has big mountains, many of them apt to erupt one of these centuries, at this time of year all snow-covered. This is one of them.

Pacific-Northwest mountain

Provided on the principle that you simply can’t have too many pictures of mountains taken from above.



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From: John Cowan (Jan 29 2007, at 08:44)

From the journal of Therem Harth rem ir Estraven:

We are on the plateau's rim. Crevasses -- some wide enough to sink villages in, not house by house but all at once -- run inland, northward, right out of sight. Most of them cut across our way, so we too must go north, not east. The surface is bad. We screw the sledge along amongst great lumps and chunks of ice, immense debris pushed up by the straining of the great plastic sheet of ice against and among the Fire-Hills. The broken pressure-ridges take queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults. A mile thick to start with, the Ice here rises and thickens, trying to flow over the mountains and choke the fire-mouths with silence. Some miles to the north a peak rises up out of the Ice, the sharp graceful barren cone of a young volcano: younger by thousands of years than the ice-sheet that grinds and shoves, all shattered into chasms and jammed up into great blocks and ridges, over the six thousand feet of lower slopes we cannot see.

During the day, turning, we saw the smoke of Drumner's eruption hang behind us like a gray-brown extension of the surface of the Ice. A steady wind blows along at ground level from the northeast, clearing this higher air of the soot and stink of the planet's bowels which we have breathed for days, flattening out the smoke behind us to cover, like a dark lid, the glaciers, the lower mountains, the valleys of stones, the rest of the earth. There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice. --But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.

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