In cyclic rhythm with the other rock was limestone. Here and again, the highway was running on this soft impure limestone. It was sea-bottom lime, from dissolved or fragmented shells, which had lithified at least ten thousand feet lower than it is now. Woody asters were in bloom in the median, and blooming, too, by the side of the road, prospering on the lime. Love pointed them out with an edge in his voice. He said they were not Wyoming plants. They had come into Wyoming with trail herds of cattle and sheep, and later in trucks and railroad cars bringing hay from hundreds of miles to the south; and disastrously they had the ability-actually, a need-to draw selenium from the rock below. Selenium, which in concentration is toxic to people and animals, is given to the wind in some volcanic ash. A hundred kantoor huren per uur rotterdam million years ago, stratovolcanoes stood in Idaho, and they sent up ash that fell out eastward in the sea. The selenium went into the lime muds, and now these alien asters were drawing it out of the limestone and spreading the poison across the surface world, as few other plants can do. Most plants ignore selenium. Woody asters and a few others require selenium in order to germinate. After they take it up from the rock, they convert it into a form that nearly all plants will, in turn, take up, too. Seleniumcontaminated plants are eaten by sheep and cattle, which are served to people as chops and burgers. Concentrated selenium destroys an enzyme that transmits messages from brain to muscles. “Cattle and sheep get the blind staggers,” Love went on. “People are kantoor huren per uur amsterdam also affected. They get dishrag heart. The liver is damaged, and the kidneys. Selenium causes sterility. Worse, it causes birth defects. It’s a cumulative poison, like lead or arsenic. It’s one of the ingredients of nerve gas.” He gestured left and right. “These were prize salt-sage flats for sheep-grazing once. They’re now poisoned and dangerous. A bad selenium area stinks like rotten garlic. On a warmer day, you could smell it. Fifty years ago, one of my first jobs was to look for seleniumconverting plants up the Gros Ventre River.