To Conquer Chaos

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The barrenland lay on the face of the world like an ulcer, nearly round, more than three hundred miles in circumference. It had been there so long that it was accepted; it was there and it was a fact and it was.

For several days’ journey in all directions away from its edge the countryside had formerly been nearly as vacant as the barrenland itself, except that grass and trees grew, which on the barrenland they did not.

With the passage of generations, however, people had crept back, driven by population pressure, or minor shifts of climate, or migration of game, or pure cussedness, until now at least a dozen settlements big enough to be called villages existed practically on the boundary line. The price of living there was the necessity of contending with the things that every so often wandered out of the barrenland and killed. But they endured that. Men endure much.

The barrenland was. That was the extraordinary part of it. Not a simple desert, which distance and word-of-mouth transmission of news had magnified into something strange and terrible, but exactly what it was reputed to be. And it was not more than a couple of days’ march north of here.

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