Chapter 15: The Bridge of Embers

The Bridge of Embers announced itself before we saw it.

The smell arrived first — sulphur and hot iron and something deeper beneath both, a mineral exhalation that had no name in the vocabulary of a cartographer accustomed to peat bogs and clay meadows. Then the light changed, the grey afternoon acquiring a reddish quality that had nothing to do with the angle of the sun, and finally the ground itself changed underfoot: solid granite giving way to a blackened, fractured substance that rang differently under boot-heel, as though the earth here was hollow, or impatient.

I noted all of this in my journal during our last rest stop and found myself using, for the first time in my professional career, the margin notation I had reserved for conditions requiring immediate recalculation. It is a small symbol, three converging lines. I had invented it during the Fenwick-Hollowell dispute, for moments when the survey stakes turned out to be in entirely the wrong field.