After the clouds had ceased to be all encompassing and became isolated drips that cast sinister, stain-like, shadows over huge swaythes of land, came a new pattern.
It was again a patchwork, but this time many of the squares contained circles. Circles that fitted exactly into the squares. In some of them, a radius gave it a clock-like appearance, but ultimately suggested some huge agricultural device that sacrificed the four corners for some level of automation. Sometimes, four squares were put together and contained a much larger circle. Sometimes, strips replaced the traditional squares. This was farming's cutting edge and took place in the middle of nowhere. I was roughly half way through my flight.
It wasn't long before agricultural progress was obscured by a herd of fluffy frogs.
A long time after that - half a Spiderman movie later - the clouds thinned enough to see red, red, rocky desert and pointy, crumpled mountains. These gave way to grey fern-leaf-like valleys within green, slimey mountainbs. It all looked like a rockpool on the beach.
When the sky had fully cleared, there was more red, rocky desert, with those fascinating fern-leave formations where water had once been, and other occasional ridges and fissures. Roads were few and relatively straight. Houses: none.
Deep gorges showed where once great rivers had flowed, and mountains crumpled upwards in that style indicative of plate movement. You know the way old mash potato goes when pushed by sliding another plate on top of a full one.
Mountains brought with them what appeared to be forestation. Part of which was smoking. It was is such a remote, high area, that I wondered if anyone actually knew about it. And what they could do if they did. I guess they could drop a couple of divers on it, that sometimes works
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