So you walk, or climb, or crawl, for day after day, across the tilted surfaces and broken edges of the great blocks of the fallen crust. You can see just what happened: The land dropped; it shattered; there was more of it than there was room for, and so it came to rest all atilt and acrackle. The violence of this ancient collapse has been scarcely masked by the three billion subsequent years of wind erosion and dustfall. It is an irony that such an unstable-looking landscape should actually be so ancient and unchanged.
So it is a matter of broken rock for as far as the eye can see. Which is not far, admittedly; even on the highest points along the way (the Maze Trail takes a line that runs from one of these to the next), the horizon is only three or four kilometers away. A very tight and jumbled wasteland of rust-tinted rock.
Then at the peak of one long roof beam of a ridge, you find yourself high enough that off to the east, a great distance away, just poking over the crackle, lie the tops of a mountain range, pale orange in the late-afternoon light. If you camp on this prominence, in the alpenglow the distant range looks like the side of a different world, rolling slowly up into the sky.
But the next morning you descend back into the maze of potholes and passlets, ridgelines and occasional flat block plateaus, like low rooftops in Manhattan. Crossing these terrains commands all your attention, and so you almost forget the sight of the distant mountain range, the problems are so great (it was in this region we found a providential crack in a thirty-meter cliff, which allowed us to climb down safely, lowering our packs on ropes)—until at the next prominence in your path through the chaos, it heaves back into view, closer now and seemingly taller, as one can see farther down its side. Not a mountain range, one now sees, but a cliff, extending north and south from horizon to horizon, etched in the usual spur-and-gully formation of cliffs everywhere, and somewhat saw-toothed at its top, but massively solid for all that—the etchings without any depth, like the brushing you see on certain metal surfaces.
And each day, when it stands over your horizon at all, it's closer. It tends to stay over the horizon longer; but never all the time, as very often you drop into the depths of the next sink in this sunken land. But eventually, continuing roughly eastward, every time you are not actually in the depths of a pothole, the cliff positively looms over the world to the east, towering over the horizon, which stubbornly remains no more than five kilometers away. So at that point you have two horizons, in effect; one near and low, the other far and high.
And eventually you get so close to it that the cliff simply fills the eastern sky. It rises astonishingly near the zenith; it's like running into the side of a bigger world. Like crawling over a dry cracked seabed to the side of a continental shelf. The gulleys and embayments in the cliff are whole landscapes in themselves now, canyon worlds of great depth and even greater steepness. Every spur between them is now seen to be a huge buttress, ribbing the side of a higher world. The occasional horizontal ledges marking the buttresses appear big enough to support complete island estates. But it's hard to tell from below.
And indeed, by the time you reach the point called Cliff Bottom View, where you stand on one of the last high points of the chaos, nearly as high as the narrow strip of hilly plateau between the chaos and the escarpment, and you can finally see all the land between where you are and the foot of the great cliff, you can no longer see the cliff's top. The mass of it blocks your view, and what you see rimming the sky, so far up toward the zenith, is not the true top, though it can seem so if you have not been paying attention, but is rather some prominence partway down its side.
Only by getting into a small blimp and taking off into the air, and flying up and away from the cliff, back out over the eastern part of the chaos, can you see the whole extent of it. If you keep sight of a reference mark, you can see that what down in the last camp you took for the top of the cliff was only about two-thirds of the way up it; the rest was blocked from view; and in any case the very strong optical effect of foreshortening had deceived you as to the true height of the thing. You keep floating up into the air, up and up and up, like a bird gyring on an updraft, and finally seeing all the cliff at once from this perspective, we just started to laugh, we couldn't help it—we were laughing or crying, or both at once, our mouths were hanging open to our chests, we positively goggled at it, and there was nothing really we could say, it was so big.
2. Flatness
There are places out in Argyre that are nothing but flat sand to the horizon in every direction.
Usually the sand is blown into dunes. Any kind of dune, from very fine ripples underfoot to truly gargantuan barchan dunes. But in some areas even that is missing, and it is simply a flat plane of sand or bedrock, with the sky arching over it.