The mantle is solid. Only in certain pockets near the surface does it turn into magma and squirt upward. The temperature of the mantle varies widely, as would the temperature of anything that is two thousand miles thick. Under the craton, it is described as chilled. By surface standards, though, it is generally white hot, everywhere around the world-white hot and solid but magisterially viscous, permitting the crust above it to “float.” Deffeyes was in his bathtub one Saturday afternoon thinking about the viscosity of the mantle. Suddenly he stood up and reached for a towel. “Piano wire!” he said to himself, and he dressed zakelijke energie vergelijken quickly and went to the library to look up a book on piano tuning and to calculate the viscosity of the wire. Just what he guessed-1022 poises. Piano wire. Look under the hood of a well-tuned Steinway and you are looking at strings that could float a small continent. They are rigid, but ever so slowly they will sag, will slacken, will deform and give way, with the exact viscosity of the earth’s mantle. “And that,” says Deffeyes, “is what keeps the piano tuner in business.” More miles, and there appears ahead of us something like a Christmas tree alone in the night. It is Winnemucca, there being no other possibility. Neon looks good in Nevada. The tawdriness is refined out of it in so much wide black space. We drive on and on toward the glow of colors. It is still far away and it has not increased in size. We pass nothing. Deffeyes says, “On these roads, it’s ten to the zakelijke energie minus five that anyone will come along.” The better part of an hour later, we come to the beginnings of the casino-flashing town. The news this year is that dollar slot machines are outdrawing nickel slot machines for the first time, ever.