She remembered being driven along Highway 1, heading roughly north from Banff to Lake Louise. To the left of the highway was a seemingly unbroken row of shattered-looking peaks, clawing at the underbellies of the low clouds. She recalled one in particular—Mount Rundle?—a massive upthrust of rock with a perfectly flat upper surface, angled upward at about forty-five degrees. At the time she’d thought it looked like a paving stone, one section of a roadway to the gods, smashed and driven upward by an unimaginable force. At the left and southern end, it terminated in a jagged cornice, from which the steady wind blew a long pennon of snow that had made her think of tatters of cloud-stuff hooked on the sharp rock. She was sure that, volcanically and geologically speaking, the Banff area had probably been "dead" millennia before mankind first appeared on the scene. But the area still possessed an aura of newness, of immediacy, of violent forces currently—but not permanently—held in check.