After about twenty minutes on the road, the rover reached the edge of Hell's Gate.
Following the contour lines, Fan Tong found a pass wide enough for the rover to pass through. He turned the wheel and drove in.
As the rover continued deeper into the mountains along the rugged, narrow trail, the nearby hematite began interfering with the signal, causing it to cut in and out.
Glancing around at the steep cliffs and rock walls, feeling the stifling atmosphere that made it hard to breathe, the astrophysicist Aubrey drew in his neck and could not help complaining.
"Why is this place called Hell's Gate, anyway? Doesn't that name creep you out?"
Fan Tong, who was driving, answered casually.
"You'd have to ask NASA. They came up with the name."
As the first organization to send a probe to Mars, NASA had named practically every slightly larger rise and dip in the terrain through Curiosity.
Perhaps the researchers in charge of naming it at the time thought the term had artistic flair, so they gave this mountain range that name. Whether it had any artistic flair was hard to say now, but it was certainly fitting.
"Random cracks several meters long appear around Hell's Gate. They look a lot like earthquake fissures, and they can lead directly into the ruins. Of course, those cracks aren't the only way inside. When I came out of the ruins, I used a fixed entrance and exit. It should be around the middle of the Hell's Gate Mountains, set into the rock wall on one side of a rift valley... It's right ahead. We're here."
Advancing along the rift valley, the rover, its engine shut off, slowly came to a stop beside a ridge. After getting out, the group followed Fan Tong to a