Outside the boundary line, rolling mountains were still covered in lush, green pines and cypresses, dotted with tenacious patches of dark green life.
But once one crossed that invisible line, it was as if the land had been snapped and crushed by a colossal, unseen hand descending from the heavens, revealing a lifeless, heart-stopping expanse of ochre-brown.
Not a single blade of grass grew; it was a thousand miles of scorched earth.
The ground was covered in a network of hideous, intersecting fissures, like the skeletal remains of the earth exposed by a dry riverbed, or a desperate scream from the land itself, cracking wantonly in all directions and stretching to the horizon.
Here, the air was scorched by the extreme heat, causing it to distort and boil with rolling waves of heat.
This searing heat did not come from the blazing sun in the sky, but steamed out endlessly from those bottomless fissures in the earth.
