The Grand Canyon

The gorge

The Grand Canyon is cut into a high tableland that rises out of the south of the Frostmark. Its head there is the highest ground in the world, more than three hundred metres up and snow-covered. From it the canyon runs down across the north of the Cinderwaste, well clear of the Smoking Mount, and on through the south of Cairnholt Downs until it opens onto the western sea. It is seven and a half kilometres long, a quarter of a kilometre deep at its head, and still near two hundred metres deep in Cairnholt.

Its walls show layers of rock you can read from the rim down. A pale cap of limestone at the top, a sheer cream sandstone cliff, deep red slopes and cliffs, and the great red cliff halfway down. Below that is the wide, greenish Tonto Platform, and under it the dark inner gorge where the river runs. The cliffs can't be climbed. The benches and slopes between them can be walked along.

It begins in the Frostmark as a shallow ravine with a stream in it, and the river saws deeper and wider all the way to the sea, its floor always falling, until it is a gorge over a quarter of a kilometre deep with a broad river in it. Its course winds in long sweeps and in short bends. The walls swing out into amphitheatres and in onto promontories. Side canyons cut far back into the plateau, up to half a kilometre, forking as they go into branches and the branches into ravines, every line winding, each narrower than what it leaves and climbing more steeply to the plateau. Their walls step down in the same layers of rock as the canyon's, and here and there a butte stands out on its own on the platform, almost as high as the rim. The river runs down the floor of the inner gorge from the head to the sea, shallow enough to wade. Where the canyon crosses from one zone into the next, its floor is the way through.

Its name is written under the minimap while you stand in it.

The trails

Pairs of trails come down into the canyon every kilometre and three quarters, one down each wall, so you can go down one side, cross the floor and come up the other. Each starts at the rim and goes down every cliff on a ledge cut slantwise into its face at a gentle walk, turning back on itself on the bench or slope below before it takes the next cliff. The last comes out on the floor near the river, where a railed wooden bridge crosses to the other wall's trail. They are trodden into the rock, not paved.

Where a road has to cross the canyon, it goes down and up by these trails rather than over the cliffs.

The caverns

Caverns open in the canyon's walls, a few in the Cinderwaste and Cairnholt and one in the Frostmark, their mouths at the foot of the slope under the great red cliff, above the platform. Each runs straight back into the rock, high and wide enough to walk in side by side, to a great chamber at its end, dark but for whatever light you carry.

Deeper still is a dungeon: the Redwall Caverns, whose gate stands on the platform under the canyon's north wall in the Cinderwaste, looking out over the gorge. Inside is a long coiling chain of flooded caves.

The rope bridges

Three rope bridges hang across the canyon from rim to rim, one in the Cinderwaste and two in Cairnholt, each near a trailhead. They are well over half a kilometre long, plank decks between rope rails, sagging toward the middle high over the river. Walking one is the quick way across; the trails are the way down.