The Rimlands stretch out in a mix of high mesas, deep canyons, arches and spires over a thousand feet high.  It was a savage hued country.  Red and yellow and white and stained wherever its rocky bones protrude from the hard packed earth with the black iron oxide curtains of desert varnish.  Looking from the craggy cliff sides of its coastal cities  toward the east, the colors blurr beneath the intense sun fading to a weak rose tint that hints of hundreds of miles of fine red sand dunes shifting their course with the wind as they cascade in wave after wave of silence.  It was a place of stark beauty and sheer majesty that dwarfs all the man-made palaces in all the cities of the known world.