The gentle slope stops abruptly at the edge of a cliff that drops almost vertically at least a thousand feet down—then it passes through the cloud layer, so there’s no way of knowing its true height. They find the memory of a trail traversing the slope. It seems to head down more frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at first, but then it grows just as brutally monotonous as every other landscape where soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go by, the snow gets patchier, the clouds get closer. One of the men falls asleep on his feet, stumbles, and tumbles end-over-end down the slope, occasionally bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through the cloud layer, he’s too far away to see.