The deep recess beneath the Second Basalt Dike was ten degrees cooler than the open desert. But the air remained stifling, stale, and dry. He smelled of crushed limestone powder dust, dried bat guano, old axle grease. The sharp, minty odor of dried pennyroyal that Paxa had scattered around the sleeping tarps to keep off scorpion ticks. Outside the sharp boundary of the shadow line, the afternoon sun had turned the white chalk-stone plain into a trembling, white-hot fire that blurred the distant northern cliffs into shimmering, liquid shapes that seemed to float above the horizon like mirages of dark ice.
Kezra Venn sat on an upturned twenty-gallon water cask near the open mouth of the water tank, her Bonded Survey Notebook open across her knees. Beside her on a clean canvas tarp, Paxa Sel had laid out their entire inventory of food for a rigorous, mid-expedition audit. Six coarse linen sacks of dried split peas, four flat bricks of salted mutton suet wrapped in heavy grease-paper, three sealed tin canisters of very thirsty barley meal, two small clay pot crocks of dried yellow onions. A small leather pouch containing three pounds of raw rock salt gathered from the lower pans.
