At about three in the afternoon, according to the dashboard clock, they stopped at a place where they could look for miles down a mostly barren, rock-strewn valley. A broad stream ran down the middle of it, many braided channels finding their way across an expanse of glacier-dropped stones. Running roughly parallel to the watercourse, on its right, was a paved road that, several miles down-valley, hopped over the river on a low bridge. They were still in the forest; for the last two hours they had been traveling at little better than a walking pace, smashing down any foliage that could not stand up to the truck’s inexorable advance, diverting around any trees that were too large to knock over, sometimes traversing slopes so steep that Zula braced her hands against the ceiling, ready for the truck to roll over sideways, sometimes avalanching down slopes so steep that little could grow on them. The front end of the truck looked like the inside of a lawn mower, covered with inches of mulch and mud. They had approached this place by following the course of a tributary, sometimes driving right down the middle of the stream and sometimes nosing up into the surrounding woods. They had now stopped at the edge of the trees. Before them the ground dropped away sharply, the tributary leaping down a succession of rapids and waterfalls to the place where it joined in with the larger river. The truck might have survived the plunge to the bottom, and had it survived, it might have been able to make it to the road and go a few more miles before running out of fuel. But if, as seemed likely, it got stuck in boulders or wrecked itself during the descent, it would have been marooned in a place that was utterly exposed to view from the road and from the air. Best to leave it here. Or this was what Zula surmised must be going on in Jones’s mind. He shifted it into reverse and backed it deeper into the trees, then killed the engine.