They were entering a place of mystery and of myth...

.. a place of death.

Nothing moved. Nothing lived in the Ironfields. It was an

unending gallery, filled with mazelike corridors of the gro-

tesque, the unspeakable. A montage still-life of end-moments

for men and their machines.

A burned-out tank with a carbonized skeleton, still frozen in

that slice of time when it had been a man struggling to be free of

a glowing-hot hatch.

The twisted, rusting remains of a great aircraft lying in the

van of a plowed-up V, marking its final touchdown.

A circular pool of superheated sand, now glazed over to form

a diamond-hard slab, its smoothness broken by the eruption of

a large, ravaged piece of steel--a piece of untitled, and very

avant-garde, sculpture.

Machines and pieces of machines litter the sand like dead

leaves. The wind slips easily through the countless edges and

angles, occasionally rising to produce an eerie music--the

combination of a wailing and the phrases of an atonal sonata.

", If one believed in them, the place would be aswarm with

ghosts. The eidolons of a million soldiers crowd the place, all

drifting in the stoop-shouldered half-step of forgotten tramps,

condemned to shamble aimlessly through the ruins forever....