Burned

"The Only Game in Town."

While Manse Everard and John Sandoval watch Mongols advancing across North America, one paragraph opens with the line:

"He raised his binoculars. Around him, the land burned..." (2, p. 134)

However, the text continues:

"...green with April." (ibid.)

Was the page layout designed to make us think, momentarily, that the Mongols were burning the land? I have not noticed this on previous readings. "...burned..." falls at the end of a line in the earliest British Pan paperback edition of Guardians Of Time but I have yet to check other editions in my possession. Poul Anderson describes the scenery. Bright leaves flutter on high beeches and:

"Pines roared in the wind, which blew down off the mountains cold and swift and smelling of melted snow, through a sky where birds were homebound in such flocks that they could darken the sun. The  peaks of the Cascade range seemed to float in the west, blue-white, distant, and holy. Eastward the foothills tumbled in clumps of forest and meadow to a valley, and so at last, beyond the horizon, to prairies thunderous under buffalo herds." (ibid.)

Four senses. As evening approaches:

"The sun, low above the western peaks, turned their snowcaps tarnished silver. Shadows lengthened down in the valley, the forest darkened, but the open meadow seemed to glow all the brighter. The underlying quiet made almost a sounding board for such noises as existed: rapid swirl and cluck of the river, ring of an ax, horses cropping in long grass. Woodsmoke tinged the air." (3, p. 138)

Three senses.

Reluctant to carry out this mission, Everard and Sandoval botch it almost catastrophically. The solution that Everard applies at the end could have been applied at the beginning but then there would have been no story.