Farrari stood behind a high parapet on the mill's flat roof and for the first time in daylight looked directly at the land of Scorvif.  Scorv was a smudge on the horizon, the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes a dark line perpendicular to it.  He activated the viewer and brought the city leaping toward him.  The smudge resolved itself into a vast clutter of buildings that crowded an enormous, truncated hill and on one side spread thinly about its base.  The tower, with its carved myriads of all-seeing eyes perpetually on guard, fascinated him.  Through a chance gap in the city's mass of buildings he could even make out a corner of the old kru's tapestry.

He recognized many of the buildings, but he had known them only as solitary structures lifted from their surroundings by the magic of the teloid cube.  As a group they looked strange to him, and he puzzled for a time over the spectacle of two sharply contrasting, almost conflicting architectural styles encroaching upon each other.

He rotated the viewer slowly.  The mill was also situated on high ground near the river, and he wondered if at one time the city as well as the ponderous old stone mill had been forts.  Between mill and city, and beyond, the country was a vast sweep of wasteland, scarred and eroded, with here and there a few scraggly zrilm bushes standing in line like ancient, enfeebled sentinels.  To the north, the horizon was lushly yellow and scarlet, and the viewer resolved it into irregularly shaped fields marked off by the dark, velvety blue of towering zrilm hedges.  The wasteland had once been like that, but the corrosive touch of the blundering rascz had exhausted it, and then the elements had devastated it, and now even the hearty zrilm could not survive there.

He took another, sweeping look at the devastated wasteland.  Much of the country's most fertile land had been ruined before the rascz grasped the simplest principles of soil management, and they still had no concept of the rudiments of plant genetics.

The distant, fertile land beyond seemed cool and restful.  He rotated the viewer quickly and then with an exclamation brought it to an abrupt stop and backtracked.  At the end of a zrilm-lined lane stood a village.  Low huts of woven branches plastered with clay stood in a narrow oval, their rough green surfaces glazed by the sun and here and there reflecting light from jewel-like facets.  At the center of the oval was the fire pit, and, nearby, a small pile of quarm logs.

A deserted ol village, tragic reminder that the rascz devastated not only land, but people; reminder of the coming two thousand years of starvation and the whistle and thud of the zrilm whip with nop otential leader in the land possessing a dram of humanitarian instinct.

Again he had forgotten the olz.

So intent was he on the crude village that he did not notice Anan Borgley until the baker spoke to him.  "Not much culture to study there," Borgley observe dryly.

"What happened to them?" Farrari demanded.

"What happened to whom?"