The Cleft is a fissure on the slope of an extinct volcano. The caldera of the volcano isn't far from where the D'ni excavated the Great Shaft, and a tunnel system beginning at the shaft leads to the city of D'ni. It is located in Eddy County, New Mexico, USA, and the land around it is owned by Jeff Zandi. Jeff inherited the land from his father, Elias Zandi, who had bought several thousands of acres around the site; just about everything you can see from the volcano belonged to Elias. Jeff just owns the section inside the fence, including the volcano.

Elias and John Loftin were the first discoverers of D'ni since Anna, and Elias was one of the founders of the DRC. The DRC spread a rumor that the Cleft was somewhere in the Middle East to keep the idly curious away.

The area is marked in KI devices as "D'ni riltagamin" ("D'ni unknown"). The D'ni never officially saw the desert, having canceled their tunnel project just short of breaking through only a few yards from the surface. However, Anna brought her husband Ātrus and son Gehn to see the Cleft and desert shortly before the Fall of D'ni.

Jeff's Streamline:

In addition to the steak on the hibachi, Jeff has two other foods on his side table. The first is a bag of chips with the label "D'nitos", and plastic bottles of beer. The labels on the beer are very difficult to read, but what can be made out is "Spokanee (???) Lite Beer".

The trailer carries a New Mexico license plate, which is a style issued for registrations in the 1990s. That was the general time frame when Elias Zandi was purchasing property surrounding the volcano.

I've been trying to identify the year and model of the trailer, and haven't found an exact match. However, explorer Harvey Midnight found one that is very, very close in appearance, a 30-foot 1971 Streamline Count.

The files use nautical terms when speaking of the sides, so I'll do that as well. This is a view of the hitch end.

This is a view of the port side.

This is a view of the starboard side.

This is a view of the tail end.

The Property

The property owned by Jeff is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. At the entrance gate there is an old sign propped out of the way, which has a message on it from before he inherited the place.

The sign reads:

This picture is an overview of the Cleft from the volcano rim. Jeff's Streamline trailer is just to the right.

Overview of the Cleft during a rain storm.

A view of the wahrk skeleton and the remains of Gehn's Star Fissure telescope from the volcano rim.

A view of the volcano's caldera from the rim. Note the giant Moiety dagger from Riven, which landed here instead of next to the Wahrk and telescope remains at the foot of the volcano. You can also see the hole down into the lava tube leading to the Great Shaft.

The volcano area was the outlet for the Star Fissure of Riven. When Atrus threw himself and the linking book to Myst in the Star Fissure, it landed in the desert near the volcano instead of being destroyed as he hoped it would be. Eventually, it was discovered by the Stranger in AD 1806.

When Riven was destroyed, a telescope device, a giant Moiety dagger and a wahrk fell into the area. The remains of all three can be found there still, the telescope and wahrk skeleton outside the volcano, and the dagger inside the caldera. The name of the animal was coined by Gehn, who cobbled it together from the English words "whale" and "shark". Gehn spelled the name "whark" in some of his notes, and "wahrk" in others.. The official DRC spelling of the name is "wahrk", a ruling given by Dr. Richard A. Watson in one of his personal publications.

The ball-like bony structure on the end of the upper jaw is the skull of the animal. While it looks small in comparison to the rest of the skeleton, if you compare it to me, standing near it, the brain it contained would have been about the size of my torso.

This is a picture of what the wahrk looked like before it found out that deserts aren't a good environment for sea creatures.

Anna and her father used the Cleft as a rest area for their journeys between their home in the Lodge and the nearest town. Anna moved into it after the death of her father, and used it as a base of operations when she discovered the Great Shaft and began exploring the D'ni tunnel and cave network.

After the Fall of D'ni, Anna lived there with Gehn, her son. Anna continued to live there alone after Gehn left her. Gehn later returned with a pregnant wife named Keta, whom he hoped Anna would be able to help as her pregnancy was difficult. Gehn's wife died of complications while giving birth, despite Anna's best efforts, and Gehn left again. Anna raised his son, Atrus, in the Cleft until Gehn came back and took Atrus away to D'ni. Much later, Atrus' daughter Yeesha lived in the cleft during her journey of self-discovery. Yeesha also visited Myst Island, but grew to hate it for reasons I do not know.

The room the desk is inside of is called the workroom. There are two drawings on the wall above the desk, which were drawn by Ātrus, the son of Gehn (He was named after his grandfather).

This is an illustration of a steam vent in the volcano's caldera.

This is an illustration of a steam powered generator Ātrus designed to charge batteries. He planned to use the batteries to power electrical lights in the Cleft. However, he failed to install adequate pressure regulation in the generator, and overpressure caused the vent to explode. Unknown to him at the time, that opened a new pathway to the D'ni tunnels leading to the Great Shaft.

Sitting on the desk is a complex device whose purpose is unknown. It contains a bewildering array of gears. There is a post on one side of the device which has D'ni writing on it.

The writing is a single word, repeated three times. Here is a magified view of it.

The word you see is retalēo, which means "the surface".

The Cleft is part of a larger area where Anna's family and descendents lived at various times. Within about five miles of the Cleft are the Lodge and Tomahna. The latter is a canyon housing complex built by Atrus, and was the home of Atrus, Catherine and Yeesha for many years. Tomahna was unusual in that it was not a tradtional house; it was a series of one or two story rooms tied together by walkways, bridges, and a combination elevator and tram car. An aerial cable car was used to travel up a canyon to reach Tomahna, and stopped at Atrus' laboratory workshop.

Tomahna, night view:

The Lodge was the childhood home of Anna, who was given the D'ni name Ti'ana by her future husband, Aitrus. After discovering the cavern, she was taken prisoner but eventually became the first ahrotahn to be granted D'ni citizenship.

The Lodge was dug out of a rock wall and was made up of a long room with a kitchen, three bedrooms, and a laboratory. It was accessed by crossing a bridge across a chasm, making it easily defensible.

Atrus and Catherine moved into Tomahna after Catherine was rescued from Riven, and Yeesha was born and raised there. It was that locale that prompted Atrus to give the pet name "desert bird" to Yeesha. It was composed of a number of separate buildings connected by walkways, and was reached by means of an aerial tram. Atrus wrote the Age of Releeshahn while living there, as a refuge for the descendents of the survivors of the Fall of D'ni.

Animal and plant life:

The desert around the cleft is home to many varieties of life. Wandering around the enclosure, it's easy to hear the buzzing of flies and chirping from a variety of insects such as grasshoppers, katydids, crickets, flies, and cicadas. Chickadees can also be heard in the area. Near the area around the remains of Gehn's telescope, you can sometimes hear the call of the same type of birds you can bring to your Relto, which are listed in DRC documentation as vultures, although they do not mention the species.

There is a pair of Zone-tailed Hawks that circle over this part of the desert. They may be a mated pair, but I can't say that with any assurance.

In the caldera, there's a brackish pond and fireflies from Direbo congregate in clouds above it. Their coloration blends in with the background, so while I got a couple of close ups of them, they are very difficult to tell apart from the background scenery. This is the best shot I was able to take.

Here are pictures of a firefly with its abdomen lit and unlit. It's quite amazing how much light the insect is able to generate, and unlike Earth fireflies, it can emit light continuously. It turns on the glow at night, and turns it off when there is daylight around it.

There are also butterflies from Direbo here. I cannot find a reference for them in any DRC or amateur publications. In the photo, I happened to catch one of the hawks in the background.

A drawing of a Direbo butterfly and a drawing of the Crimson Kadish butterfly, to show that they seem to be either the same species with different coloration, or closely related. The Crimson Kadish is thought to be native to Laki'ahn, which may mean that the Direbo butterfly is also originally from that Age, and was introduced to Direbo and the caldera later. Note the lack of antenna and the small abdomen fused to the thorax, features that set this species apart from butterflies native to Earth.

Bahro Petroglyphs in the cave:

Under the tree at the end of the Cleft is a cave that the Bahro made for Yeesha's quest. Inside it is a pedestal and a series of glowing petroglyphs. Originally, the pedestal held a copy of the Relto book for each explorer to collect. Later, when she began to pass out Relto books directly to those that were called, it held a Relto page that added the pillars for the Path of the Hand.

On the walls of the cave, there are several Bahro petroglyphs. The first was Yeesha's mark, a monogram of her name surrounded by a rosette of symbols that are important in describing her personality. The symbols are, from 12:00 o'clock and moving clockwise to 4:00 o'clock, a spiral hand to reprensent her personal journey of discovery and the first quest she created; a roadrunner to represent the nickname her father gave her, "desert bird"; a book overlaying a shape like a volcano, to represent her mastery of the Art and the cleft; and finally another roadrunner. The symbols repeat on the other side of the rosette.

Yeesha's name in D'ni means "laughter", and is spelled yESa. The monogram is laid out more or less like this.

In the second chamber of the cave, several petroglyphs surround the pedestal. In this drawing, they are: a fairly typical Bahro depiction of Yeesha herself; the D'ni cavern with three Bahro figures above it; a linking book with Yeesha's mongram on it, which is a device that is sometimes combined with the first glyph; the Cleft volcano; and a spiral that may represent Yeesha's journy or her approach to the Art. The spiral is often used when showing her writing or studying in other petroglyphs. Spirals were also very important to the Bahro, and appear in many of their petroglyphs and decorations. In fact, the original home of the Bahro is called the Spiral Age.

The petroglyphs in the cave are most likely to be introductions to symbology the Bahro use in petroglyphs the explorer will encounter again later.

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