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"Hahaha! At last, the sky is high and birds can fly as they please—the feathers of the Three Gods have flown to the legendary homeland! What a rugged stretch of mountains, what a river valley suddenly opening wide!..."
The sky was bright golden yellow, the mountains a vast grayish yellow; there was not much green, and rainfall was limited too. Amid the hard, towering mountain ranges were a few sparse veins of black coal stretching out, and the occasional mottled gleam of gilded color. That gilded sheen held true Goldstone, and also hidden copper ore. And the valleys of the Opata tribes, rich in coal and copper—the later U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the mineral-rich inland mountains of Sonora—abruptly unfolded at the end of the mountain path!
"Hahaha! This perilous mountain path—if someone built a stockade here and stationed guards, even one or two hundred tribal Militia, we wouldn't be able to get over it! Terrain as marvelous as this is even harder to attack than the mountains of Colima! And these pockets of valley divided up among the mountains, though a little dry, all have Great Rivers flowing through them, enough to grow Corn, pumpkin, and Sweet Potato! Now that we've reached here, we've finally weathered it through. I'm so happy it's like we've come home!... Hahaha!..."
Old feather Penguari climbed to the mountaintop and looked down at the valley below, and at the village cooksmoke rising far in the distance. His whole body was tattered and torn, stained with dark-red blood that had not been washed away in ages, and his face was split with delighted laughter. He leaned on a climbing Scepter, breathing the wind and sand of the eastern Wasteland, as confident as a monkey blessed by fate, as ragged as a crazed Rat King. Behind him, a