About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, February 3, 2006
Back on the road
Category: story, 04:51 PM
We've been travelling for just over two weeks now and, as I expected, my key signal has been intermittent. For some reason we seem to have hit a good spot the past few days, perhaps because we're travelling throughcountry at relatively high altitudes, so I've taken the chance to read through, and reply to, a lot of mail from home. I see a few of you noticed that I'd posted something to my blog - it seemed like the best idea. I didn't want my dad noticing that I hadn't posted anything and wondering why. I feel worse and worse about lying, though. Perhaps because what I say is getting further and further from the truth.
So, an update. For the past two weeks we've been heading north and west, averaging about 200 miles a day, taking it in turns to drive. We're not travelling especially quickly - lots of the areas we're going through aren't properly mapped, the roads are poor and we often have to stop to navigate. Also, we're not travelling at night - we don't know what's out here and we don't especially want to run into anything big (a cougar, a mountain, a human being) that comes up on us unexpectedly. Still, we've been making progress. The days have been getting noticeably shorter and colder as we get further north - we're both glad of the fur jackets we bought back in Tanraga, despite the irony of wearing fur when all my friends think I'm rescuing cute animals from danger.
I'd say it's beautiful here, except that that doesn't begin to describe it. It's huge. It's the hugeness which is so overwhelming. I mean, I thought I'd seen hugeness in the city - I've been to the top of Ascendancy Point, I've taken boats out from Alchemy Bay. But that hugeness is nothing compared to this. The land we've been travelling through this past week is so flat that it feels like the sky is right on top of the ground, like you might bump your head on the sky at any moment. We've been driving along a coastal road for the past three days - the sea's a choppy dark-grey here, so different from the coast of Perplex City. There are enormous birds which hover in the sky, staring down at the patches of scrubland we're driving through, then dive down to pick up some of the smaller badger-like creatures which eat the vegetation here. Allain knows the names for all these animals - he tells me, but I can't seem to hold them all in my mind.
Allain himself is doing better. He's come out of himself a little - he had been so withdrawn. But he's been getting nightmares. He mutters and shouts out at night in the tent, so that I have to wake him gently. He doesn't seem to remember what these nightmares are about when he wakes up. Or if he does, he doesn't tell me.
Anyway, we're getting closer to our destination. Or at least what we think is our destination. We've been following the signs and messages Claire Castille left for us. Those coded messages have led to more extensive information, with a trail we're following now - yesterday we passed a rock formation shaped something like a table-and-chair which she had said we would. (I don't know how she knew about this - either she must have been here before us, or she has access to photographs which aren't available publicly.) She called it the "Anjsbourg gate". And today, just before sunset, we found a ruined house. It was the first sign of human habitation we've seen in more than a week. We went to look around - it was just a stone cottage, built with its windows facing the sea. Its roof was gone, and so were half the walls, but there was still enough to see that, once upon a time, someone had lived here. It gave me a strange feeling. What kind of place are we going to?