It was hot on Floor 32.
Not warm. A hard white sun coming straight down out of a sky with nothing in it, not one cloud from one edge to the other, and heat coming back up off the ground so thick that the hills in the distance wavered at the tops.
They were standing on a road.
It was a causeway, properly built — four metres wide, packed stone and earth, raised about two metres above the ground on either side, with the remains of low kerbing along the edges.
And on either side of it, going away for kilometres in both directions, was dry land.
Flat ochre ground baked so hard it had split into plates, cracks running through it a hand's width across. Dead scrub standing up out of it in pale clumps, and shallow gullies cut through the hardpan between them, deep enough that James could tell from thirty feet away a man could lie down in one and disappear. Bleached trees stood up out of it here and there with nothing on them.
