Max leads you down a narrow defile, barely wide enough to accommodate the Interceptor. The defile leads into a maze of narrow canyons, deep and narrow, hemmed in by steep walls. The canyons deepen as you travel and soon you are hundreds of feet below the plain.
After several turns and one harrowing backtrack where Max lost his way, the gorge feeds into a larger canyon, one with an entrenched river running through it. This canyon is wide, a quarter of a mile across, though the sides are still sheer and steep.
You follow the river around a bend and see the flow encounters a natural dam and spreads out into a wide still lake.
While the river was blood red, as has all the water you have seen so far in this place, the lake is a deep blue and does not bubble and boil. More natural, green vegetation, bamboo, some palms and other trees and grasses grow along the shore.
A settlement is built on the near shore of this lake, a cluster of two dozen huts and tents, most built high on stilts stretch around the shore and out into the lake itself. One especially impressive elevated structure lies far out in the lake, multiple platforms on thirty foot high stilts, covered in tenting, a lake pavilion.
The settlement is not unguarded however, a low wall lies across the entrance to the hidden valley, two watchtowers man a steel gate.