Eight hours.
Ambrose looked at the surroundings with the specific, slightly betrayed quality of someone who has been applying sustained, effortful forward movement to a problem and has arrived at the realization that the problem has not been proportionately responsive. The Iron Tree Forest extended in every direction with the specific, indifferent consistency of an environment that does not register the urgency of the people moving through it — the same dark tree line, the same quality of light filtered through the same density of canopy, the same atmospheric composition that had been present at hour one and hour four and was present now at hour eight with no apparent reduction in any of its defining characteristics....
We have been walking for so long, and yet we have yet to even leave the outer perimeters.
