The ascent up the watchtower ladder reveals solid workmanship.<br/><br/>Whoever constructed it knew what they were doing.  The rungs are pounded soundly; the whole frame set deep in the ground.  A bit of sanding, and Masina would have no quarrel with it.  A few splinters have to yield to the calloused coats of her hands, but otherwise the ladder cooperates entirely.<br/><br/>Emerging from the portal in the tower floor, Massina finds a spacious nest awaiting her.  The dry gape of the surrounding land still leaks in here, but coolness nestles in the thatch-sheltered circle.  Only trace speckles of sunlight, enough to salt the skin with bemusing warmth, make it through the bushy top.  Shadow forms a thin lagoon, above a level, tight plank bottom and a few bits of rubbish: A top, a burnt-down candle, a ball of papyrus.  Breeze browses lazily about.<br/><br/>The nest seems an island of temperance lodged in the breast of a burning sea.<br/><br/>From all around it, the land stretches in a great and gaping cradle of dusty earth.<br/><br/>The modest patch of the green grape grove ends against the snarl of a hillside's rock - a heaving deformity of stone that twists and widens like a stitched wound coming undone, becoming fissured crests to the south, then a thorned chasm, then a wasteland of alien shapes.  By the time it reaches the horizon - a point so far and so strangely clear that its measure seems to redefine the limits of the sense of sight - the terrain has fractured into a flat madness:  An eerie desert riddled with pits, fissures, writhing stone that continues past where the sky can go no farther.<br/><br/>To east and west, the river runs its course through the bone throat of dry land.  It snakes through the thin stands of reeds and marsh grass, cutting along the dry channel around it.  Either direction sees its red, velvetine breadth winding through beige sand, white hills and lean and yellow cropland.<br/><br/>And to the north, hills covered with wooly blankets of foliage spill up out of the river valley.  Unlike the vastness to the south, this land has a regularity to its steep gradients - a sweeping sense to how the line of land dips and soars, clasped under the jacket of groves woven thickly over it.  The difference with the southern shore is so distinct, it seems as though the Red River formed a border between two planets.<br/><br/>The watchtower stands on a crimson suture sewing together two worlds.<br/><br/>For all the contrast it surveys, the tower is a peaceful place.  The land it surveys seems distant; muted.<br/><br/>Massina hardly notices the puff of dust a kilometer to the west, announcing the slow approach of four robed fingers, a very uninspired mule, and their cart.