The Mekillot Mountains are a haven to many creatures
who would find life on the Great Ivory Plain unpleasant.
There are a number of flowering desert trees, cacti, and
even a form of prickly pear. Small desert flowers dot the
badlands in the season of sun ascending, and various
forms of climbing vines are scattered across the badlands.
The mekillots are essentially an island of life in the
barren sea of the Great Ivory Plain.
The animal life is similarly diverse. Herds of erdland
and hives of wild kank wander the lower sections of the mountains, grazing on the grasses and flowering plants
found there. Predators of the region include giant lizards,
leopards, tigones, and bulettes, who roam the mountains.
Many of these creatures would be very dangerous in the
nearby Verdant Belt, but the barrier of the Great Ivory
Plain keeps them in the Mekillot Mountain region.
The Mekillot Mountains are occupied by a number of
dwarf banshees. There are reputed to be as many as 40
of these fell creatures somewhere in this mountain range.
Scholars in Nibenay speculate that there may have been
some major dwarf project in the mountains centuries
ago, and that the dwarf banshees were devoted to it as
their focus. No one has ever returned with reports of a
dwarven fortress in the mountains, but if it is infested with
banshees, it isn't likely that they would.
The Mekillot Mountains are an old, low-lying range in
the center of the Great Ivory Plain. Like the creatures that
are the mountains' namesake, the Mekillot Mountains
are long, wide ridges, looking very much like a line of
gargantuan mekillots. Some say that the mountain range
was once a chain of islands in the center of a water-filled
lake, but few believe such stories these days.
The mountain range is stratified into three concentric
types of terrain. The outer zone is a ring of stony barrens
which represent the outermost foothills of the range. These
barrens stand on a rise marking the geologic foundation
of the mountain range. The barrens are windswept and
are often innundated with saltstorms from the surrounding
salt flats.
Moreover, there are low-lying areas and caves within
the badlands that are lined with salt. A number are the
sites of salt mines, although most of these are abandoned.
Indeed, it is just such a cavern that now houses the slave
city of Salt View Inside the ring of barrens lies a long band of rocky
badlands. This band covers the entire interior space of
the range, with the mountains themselves rising at either
end. Like other rocky badlands, there are many canyons,
caverns, and pillars of stone in this region.
Within the rocky badlands are the two mountain
clusters. The northern cluster, known as the Greater
Mekillots, are higher while the southern cluster-the Lesser
Mekillots – consists of a number of smaller peaks. The
highest of the Greater Mekillots is perhaps 3,000 feet,
while the lowest of the Lesser Mekillots still stands over
1,500 feet. While these mountains are not as tall as
others in the region, they are quite long and bulky. Each
mountain is actually a ridge some 5 to 7 miles long and
1 to 2 miles wide. There are perhaps a dozen major
mountains in each group, running through some 15 miles
of mountain ridges, before descending into rocky badlands
again. Even the highest of these peaks does not cause the
nausea or dizziness one associates with scaling the Forest
Ridge or the Windbreak Mountains.
The gap between the Greater and Lesser Mekillots
is known as the Gaj, apparently because the gap is
not unlike the space opened in a mekillot line when a
predator lands among them. The area is not, however, well
known for a large population of the insectoid predators.
Like the remainder of the Great Ivory Plain, this area
gets little rainfall. However, without the salt flats to absorb
the water, there are a number of wells and underground
springs in this region that make water available to travelers.
Also, the darker stones of the rocky badlands diminish
the heat slightly, so a traveler in these mountains suffers
no more from the heat than one does elsewhere on Athas.