Page 52 - Demo

Natch!38Biting white. Windswept white. A desert of whiteness brokenonly seldomly by the occasional volcano or dry rocky valley. Onlyalong the advancing and receding coast would you get the dirtywhites and blue whites, and the sensational jade bergs that werein all the promotional literature. The ancient mariners had waxedpoetic about the emerald islands. Thena had inspired that littlepiece of magic eons ago. She liked the sparkle of the jade bergs,and the minerals inside the floating jewels fed the tinyphytoplankton, the foundation of the Southern Ocean foodchain.The Far South interior was far less white than Lucky or Jinxhad ever seen it. Brown. Gray brown. Sand brown. Chocolatebrown. Beige brown. Panda poop brown (which has a kind ofcaramel tinge from all that bamboo). Where there was white, itwas melted round, thin and pockmarked, wind-speckled withsand and gravel. Only the lakes were brilliant turquoise blue, withfloating glacial silt suspended near the surface reflecting acloudless sky. One by one the monitors turned turquoise blue asthey passed over more and more lakes. It felt like all the channelswere covering this special edition of Turquoise Blues. Betweencrunches and sips, Lucky and Jinx took turns pointing out thestriking beauty of one lake after another%u2014the way the lingeringbergs floated in the center or hovered at the edges like brokenpie crust; the way the occasional jade berg contrasted with theturquoise blue sparkle; the way some lakes seemed to beemptying like enormous toilet bowls; the animal shapes made bysome of the bergs when they randomly linked together%u2014a herdof rhinos, a giant tarantula, a double-humped camel, a shaggybuffalo. Lucky imagined the frolicking children of giantssplashing in their great galoshes through the countless lakes likepuddles. He thought of the enormous tidal wave splashes theywould cause as they rambled across the landscape. Even now,some of the smaller lakes had a decidedly %u201cfootprinty%u201d shape tothem.%u201cIt%u2019s hard to remember what it was like before,%u201d Jinx admittedsadly. It wasn%u2019t so much that he missed all the white as what all