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 17, 2006
Travelling to Anjsbourg
Category: story, 07:24 PM
I'm so sorry I'm writing infrequently. Out here, my contact with the key network is so limited, and so much of that has to be used to keep up the pretence to my friends and my family that I'm still working at a nature reserve in the mountains. I'll try to fill you in on as much as I can, but I think the story of what's happened in the past two weeks will take a while to send. I hope you can be patient.
Firstly, Allain's insisted I make it clear to you all that we haven't been travelling for 3,000 miles in a straight line! We take what roads or tracks exist, and they tend to be winding and circuitous. Added to that, we had to go nearly 1,000 miles out of our way - 500 there and 500 back - to go around a range of mountains whose name I don't even know, not to mention numerous more minor diversions around forests, lakes and ravines. There are no bridges or tunnels or ways cut through the trees. No one has been this way before us to make it easier for us. When we come to a river that's too wide to cross, we have to go upstream until we find the place where it's narrower. Still, as the crow (or one of your aeroplanes) flies, we're about 1,600 miles from Perplex City now. Sometimes I wonder if we're going to fall off the edge of the world, like Madna does in the stories. Maybe, like him, we'll meet our shadows on the other side.
After I last wrote to you, we began travelling even more slowly. We came across more abandoned houses, slowly at first, only one every 10 or 20 miles, and then more frequently, even two or three clumped together. They were all in the same state of disrepair, all looked like they hadn't been inhabited for centuries. But still, we're looking for Claire Castille, we had to check every one.
As we travelled further, we found that some of the houses had strange marks on them. Only to one side - the side we're travelling toward. We started to see these marks on some of the larger rock formations as well. Black streaks, etched into the rock. Like the stones at the base of a campfire, like the air burned on them. Allain's been making notes and collecting samples and taking pictures with his key. We don't talk about what we think might have caused them. We both have the same suspicion and it has to do with the war, with Viendenbourg, with what we've come here to find. It seems to make Allain happy to collect the specimens, although I don't know what he's planning to do with them. He says his mother always taught him how important it was to collect "scientific evidence" even in the days they used to go for country walks together, looking for signs that spring was coming. I can't help wondering what Claire's been looking for evidence of, what Allain's looking for now.
But, after several days of travelling like that - slowly, meticulously, collecting samples, coming across more and more scarred rocks, I think we've now found what it was evidence of. We brought the car up a low hill, just enough to conceal the valley below from sight. We're used to this now. We go slowly, in case there's a sheer drop the other side. There was a falling off on the other side of this rise, a dip in the earth, enough so that we had a view across maybe two or three miles of valley. Empty valley, for the most part, filled with scrubby plants, a river running through it down towards the sea. A good place for a settlement. Someone else must have thought so too because, on the outskirts of this valley, where the rocks curl over to give a little protection to the area underneath, there were houses. Broken houses, but houses, in a wide half-moon shape, extending around the circumference. Like scraps of crust left in a pie dish after the pie had been tipped out. The remains of Anjsbourg.