terrain

His feet are perfectly adapted to the terrain, with special fats to keep them from freezing and strong claws to grip the ice.

But reality dictates that engineers choose the maximum speed of a roadway based on a careful balancing act of terrain, traffic, existing obstacles, and of course, safety.

So if you're trying to condense 1,200 years into 120 pages or even, you know, even 200 pages, there's no way to do so realistically and give a sense of the whole terrain.