The travellers settled into a monotonous routine

The travellers settled into a monotonous routine, one day blending into the next with weary regularity. The advancing season changed so gradually, they hardly noticed when the warm sun become a scorching ball of flame searing the steppes, turning the flat plain into a jaundiced monochrome of dun earth, buff grass and beige rocks against a dust laden yellowish drab sky. For three days their eyes smarted with smoke and ashes carried by the prevailing winds from a sweeping prairie fire. They passed massive herds of bison, and giant deer with huge palmate antlers, horses, onagers and asses; more rarely, saiga antelope with horns growing straight out of the tops of their heads slightly curved back at the tips; tens upon tens of thousands of grazing animals supported by the extensive grassland.
Long before they neared the marshy isthmus, that both connected the peninsula to the main continent and served as an outlet for the shallow salty sea to the northeast, the massive mountain range, second highest on earth, loomed into view. Even the lowest peaks were capped with glacial ice to halfway down their flanks, coldly unmoved by the searing heat of the plains. When the level prairie merged into low rolling hills, dotted with fescue and father grass, and red with a richness of iron ore - the red ochre making it hallowed ground - Brun knew the salt marsh was not far beyond. It was a secondary and more tenuous link . The primary connection of the peninsula to the mainland was the northern one that formed past of the western boundary of the smaller inland sea.