Seasonal differences in The Ironwood Staff

 I came across an interesting artefact of Google Earth's street-view data gathering. At the junction of the R560 and the R563 in Gauteng Province near the border with North West there's a corner we used to turn east on, when we were going to the Sappers Club in Skeerpoort on holiday. On Google Earth, they took the images for the north-south R563 in summertime; but the footage for the east-west R560 was taken in winter.

At that latitude and altitude, winter is cool and dry, while summer is hot and wet (you hope!). The summer pictures show lovely wet soil, heavy cloud and thick, green grass and leafy trees. The winter, cloudless, dusty skies, with the roadside dry sand and the grass dry and yellow, the trees bare and bristling with thorns. These two pairs of shots show the seasonal differences in stark contrast.

Summer time:

Winter time!

Summer time!

Winter time!

In The Ironwood Staff, this was the countryside the rescued slaves were walked through on the way to Greystone.

WIP: The World of The Ironwood Staff

 A big part of worldbuilding is always map-making. The epic back-story of the Eladi of the Sunlands takes place on a huge continent stretching from the northern tropics to the southern temperate zones. It's taken too long to get this map into digital format, straighten out the details. This is what it looks like now, before I've put the place-names (i.e. without lettering).

The horizontal line through the lower part is the southern tropic (Capricorn in this world). I've added so much, the detail is eye-watering. Maybe it needs a complete re-drafting, at a much smaller scale.