The One Place It Does
East of the mountains there is a creek that runs through a wide bowl of dry ground, and in one stretch of it the water is hot.
You can see it from where you leave the car before you can see the creek. Steam stands up off the bed in the cold, white and slow, and leans with the air, and goes. There is a path down, and a fence along the path, and a sign every little way saying the water is hotter than it looks and that people have been hurt.
I stood at the fence. The creek was blue in the deep places and moving, and here and there one part of it gave up more steam than the rest, as if something underneath had turned over.
At home it comes up from below everywhere. That is what fog is. In the south there is a thasseth, very large, and at every high water the inside of the ring breathes out and the fog goes down the walls and is gone before it reaches the floor. Nobody has fenced it. You would not know where to put the fence.
Here they have found the one place it does, and put a fence round that.
A man beside me said it was the whole valley, not only the creek. He said it had all gone up once, a long time ago, and that it could again. He said it cheerfully, the way you would say it might rain.
I stood there an hour and ten minutes. The steam did not stop once. I did not want to leave before it did, and it was not going to.