Across The Desert Quotes

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Don't think about what you've left behind" The alchemist said to the boy as they began to ride across the sands of the desert. "If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

I'd run my whole life long to reach you; paddle my way across Atlantic and Pacific; traverse Jungle and Desert to find you; climb cliffs and drop from the sky to rescue you. Anything to be close to you. Any way to say I love you.

The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

There had been certain romantic interludes in the past that had included galloping across the desert at night; but he had never abducted any woman whose enthusiastic support for such a plan had not been secured well in advance.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?

Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. June 19, 1970–April 7, 2004:

Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers in the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat of fat is cut off and placed in his mouth to sustain his soul for its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.

The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story.

Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.

I shouldn't have lost my temper that way. It just pricks his pride, makes him dig in his heels." "So why did you?" I asked, genuinely curious. It was rare for Nikolai's emotions to get the best of him. "I don't know," he said, shredding the leaf. "You got angry. I got angry. The room was too damn hot." "I don't think that's it." "Indigestion?" he offered. "It's because you actually care about what happens to this country," I said. "The throne is just a prize to Vasily, something he wants to squabble over like a favorite toy, You're not like that. You'll make a good king." Nikolai froze. "I…" For once, words seemed to have deserted him. Then a crooked, embarrassed smile crept across his face. It was a far cry from his usual self-assured grin. "Thank you," he said. I sighed as we resumed our pace. "You're going to be insufferable now, aren't you?" Nikolai laughed. "I'm already insufferable.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.

Ego Tripping I was born in the congo I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light I am bad I sat on the throne drinking nectar with allah I got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst My oldest daughter is nefertiti the tears from my birth pains created the nile I am a beautiful woman I gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert with a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes I crossed it in two hours I am a gazelle so swift so swift you can't catch me For a birthday present when he was three I gave my son hannibal an elephant He gave me rome for mother's day My strength flows ever on My son noah built new/ark and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day I turned myself into myself and was jesus men intone my loving name All praises All praises I am the one who would save I sowed diamonds in my back yard My bowels deliver uranium the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels On a trip north I caught a cold and blew My nose giving oil to the arab world I am so hip even my errors are correct I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission I mean...I...can fly like a bird in the sky...

I do believe I begin to grasp the nature of miracles! For would it be a miracle, if there was any reason for it? Miracles have nothing to do with reason. Miracles contradict reason, they strike clean across mere human deserts, and deliver and save where they will. If they made sense, they would not be miracles.

The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.

For Jenn At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts. I fought with my knuckles white as stars, and left bruises the shape of Salem. There are things we know by heart, and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke. I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos, but I could never make dying beautiful. The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself veins are kite strings you can only cut free. I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist. I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree, and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers, and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys the same way a soldier holds his breath the first time his finger clicks the trigger. We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe. But my lungs remember the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat. And I knew life would tremble like the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek, like a prayer on a dying man's lips, like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone… just take me just take me Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much, the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood. We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways, but you still have to call it a birthday. You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess and hope she knows you can hit a baseball further than any boy in the whole third grade and I've been running for home through the windpipe of a man who sings while his hands playing washboard with a spoon on a street corner in New Orleans where every boarded up window is still painted with the words We're Coming Back like a promise to the ocean that we will always keep moving towards the music, the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain. Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open. The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks. Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert, then wake us washing the feet of pregnant women who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun. I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun. I know the heartbeat of his mother. Don't cover your ears, Love. Don't cover your ears, Life. There is a boy writing poems in Central Park and as he writes he moves and his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart, and there are men playing chess in the December cold who can't tell if the breath rising from the board is their opponents or their own, and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subway swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun with strip malls and traffic and vendors and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic. But every ocean has a shoreline and every shoreline has a tide that is constantly returning to wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones, to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river that has to run through the center of our hearts to find its way home.

Are you a child?” Ernest asked. “Mate, we’re about to go flying across the desert in giant magic toboggans. If that doesn’t eke out any childlike wonder, then you might want to check your soul’s still in there.

its like you said? i lead my people-" forth!" zifnab carried on enthusiastically! " out of eygpt! out of bondage! across the desert! pillar of fire-" desert?" lenthan looked anxious again. "fire? i thought we were going to the stars!" sorry. wrong script" zifnab said

Wild Geese" You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

She was tired in her bones, but she rallied her energy one last time and told him of they years in Rifthold, of stealing Asterion horses and racing across the desert, of dancing until dawn with the courtesans and thieves and all the beautiful, wicked creatures in the world. And then she told him about losing Sam, and of that first whipping in Endovier, when she'd spat blood in the Chief Overseer's face, and what she had seen and endured in the following year. She spoke of the day she had snapped and sprinted for her own death. Her heart grew heavy when at last she got to the evening when the Captain of the Royal Guard prowled into her life, and a tyrant's son had offered her a shot at freedom. She told him what she could about the competition and how she'd won it, until her words slurred and her eyelids drooped.

Tell me,' I said. 'Tell me when you notice me.' I notice you going into church,' Joshua said. 'I notice your hair, how blond it is. But how in some light it looks like it has red in it. I notice the way you smell when we're close. And the way you walk when we're headed home from church and your family gets out of the Temple first. I notice how you are with your family and how you hold your little sisters. I've seen you stand out on your doorstep and look across the desert. I've watched you walk toward the Compound fence and then on past that. You've been walking for years.

The people celebrate with our traditional dancing: the women clapping their hands and chanting, their low sweet voices humming across the desert night, and the men leaping high into the air. Everyone contributes food, and we eat

What do you think happens" I said instead. "When we die?" Jin didn't believe in gods. He didn't believe in heavens or hells or worlds after. Just in this world. Just in now. Jin traced my face, like he was trying to remember it. "I think they burn us and we become dust and ash." He ran a finger across the edge of my lips. "And I think that the dust that was me will spend until the end of time trying to get as close as possible the the dust that was you out in that vast desert.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts.

...desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels,...

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!

And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34)

But if I had know I had a daughter, I would have found a solution." He studies me, waiting until my eyes raise to meet his. "I would have swum across the oceans. I would have scaled mountains. I would have crossed deserts. I would have found a way.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

The sun is rising through a yellow, howling wind. Time for breakfast. Inside the trailer now, broiling bacon and frying eggs with good appetite, I hear the sand patter like rain against the metal walls and brush across the windowpanes. A fine silt accumulates beneath the door and on the window ledge. The trailer shakes in a sudden gust. All one to me -- sandstorm or sunshine I am content, so long as I have something to eat, good health, the earth to take my stand on, and light behind the eyes to see by.

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo II astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals. One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour. ‘What do you want?’ they asked. ‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’ ‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts. The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly. ‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts. ‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’ When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.

Every difficult task that comes across your path—every one that you would rather not do, that will take the most effort, cause the most pain, and be the greatest struggle—brings a blessing with it.

You and Wes," she said, triumphant, "are just likethis ." She was holding a book, a paperback romance. The title, emblazoned in gold across the cover, wasForbidden , and the picture beneath it was of a man in a pirate outfit, eye patch and all, clutching a small, extremely busty woman to his chest. In the background, there was a deserted island surrounded by blue water. "We're pirates?" I said. She tapped the book with one fingernail. "This story," she said, "is all about two people who can't be together because of other circumstances. But secretly, they pine and lust for each other constantly, the very fact that their love is forbidden fueling their shared passion." "Did you just make that up?" "No," she said, flipping the book over to read the back cover. "It's right here! And it's totally you and Wes. You can't be together, which is exactly why you want to be. And why you can't admit it to us, because that would make it less secret and thus less passionate.

The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.

Murtaugh Allsbrook and his riders spread the news like wildfire. Down every road, over every river, to the north and south and west, through snow and rain and mist, their hooves churning up the dust of each kingdom. And for every town they told, every tavern and secret meeting, more riders went out. More and more, until there was not a road they had not covered, until there was not one soul who did not know that Aelin Galathynius was alive—and willing to stand against Adarlan. Across the White Fangs and the Ruhnns, all the way to the Western Wastes and the red-haired queen who ruled from a crumbling castle. To the Deserted Peninsula and the oasis-fortress of the Silent Assassins. Hooves, hooves, hooves, echoing through the continent, sparking against the cobblestones, all the way to Banjali and the river-front palace of the King and Queen of Eyllwe, still in their midnight mourning clothes. Hold on, the riders told the world. Hold on.

A typical race morning usually starts out looking like a scene from a zombie movie: individuals or pairs of people walking down a deserted street, all headed in the same direction.... Inevitably, regardless of the weather, U2's "Beautiful Day" streams out of loudspeakers.

Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across Europe. They eat screams and drink pain. You had your horrors at the Overlook, Danny, but at least you were spared these folks.

Why did people circle one another, consumed with either fear or envy, when all the they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did they build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypally paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane. I didn't want ever to leave this desert. I knew that I would forget.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish. Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards?

We marched across half a world. We chased a Whirlwind. We walked out of a burning city. We stood against our own in Malaz City. We took down the Letherii Empire, held off the Nah’ruk. We crossed a desert that couldn’t be crossed. Now I know how the Bridgeburners must have felt, as the last of them was torn down, crushed underfoot. All that history, vanishing, soaking red into the earth. Back home – in the Empire – we’re already lost. Just one more army struck off the ledgers. And this is how things pass, how things simply go away. We’ve gone and marched ourselves off the edge of the world. I don’t want to say goodbye.

Did I seek where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no one lives, in the desert where only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god, become a ghost flitting across the glaciers?

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness. Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.' There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.

In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.

The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

The magic ground against my mind and I heard the same word whispered over and over in my head. “Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit.” Oh my God. I knew that name. I read about her. I studied her legends, but I never thought I would come across anything of hers because she had been dead for thousands of years. Dead and buried in distant Iraq, somewhere on the east bank of the Tigris River. That name belonged to the bones in front of me. I could feel it. I knew this magic. I was looking at the corpse of my grandmother. She wanted me to say her name. She wanted to know that I understood. I opened my mouth and said it out loud. “Semiramis.” Her magic drenched me, not the blow of a hammer, but a cascade of power, pouring onto me as if I stood under a waterfall. Z’emir-amit. The Branch Bearer. The Shield of Assyria. The Great Queen Semiramis. A line from Sarchedon floated up from my memory. When she turns her eyes on you, it is like the golden lustre of noon-day; and her smile is brighter and more glorious than sunset in the desert… To look on her face unveiled is to be the Great Queen’s slave for ever more.

This election is about the past vs. the future. It's about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today or whether we reach for a politics of common sense and innovation, a politics of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. There are those who will continue to tell us that we can't do this, that we can't have what we're looking for, that we can't have what we want, that we're peddling false hopes. But here is what I know. I know that when people say we can't overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of that elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day, an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope. So don't tell us change isn't possible. That woman knows change is possible. When I hear the cynical talk that blacks and whites and Latinos can't join together and work together, I'm reminded of the Latino brothers and sisters I organized with and stood with and fought with side by side for jobs and justice on the streets of Chicago. So don't tell us change can't happen. When I hear that we'll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who is now devoted to educating inner city-children and who went out into the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign. Don't tell me we can't change. Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can seize our future. And as we leave this great state with a new wind at our backs and we take this journey across this great country, a country we love, with the message we carry from the plains of Iowa to the hills of New Hampshire, from the Nevada desert to the South Carolina coast, the same message we had when we were up and when we were down, that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we will hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words -- yes, we can.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia!

And once more given to inaction, Empty in spirit and alone, He settled down – to the distraction Of making other minds his own; Collecting books, he stacked a shelfful, Read, read, not even one was helpful: Here, there was dullness, there pretence; This one lacked conscience, that one sense; All were by different shackles fettered; And, past times having lost their hold, The new still raved about the old. Like women, books he now deserted, And mourning taffeta he drew Across the bookshelf’s dusty crew.

It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who travelled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come sand go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.

Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it's coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.

Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating; each atom is like a wobbly spinning top that radiates energy. Because each atom has its own specific energy signature (wobble), assemblies of atoms (molecules) collectively radiate their own identifying energy patterns. So every material structure in the universe, including you and me, radiates a unique energy signature. If it were theoretically possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert’s floor. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust devil–like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere. As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void. The atom has no physical structure—the emperor has no clothes! Remember the atomic models you studied in school, the ones with marbles and ball bearings going around like the solar system? Let’s put that picture beside the “physical” structure of the atom discovered by quantum physicists. No, there has not been a printing mistake; atoms are made out of invisible energy not tangible matter! So in our world, material substance (matter) appears out of thin air. Kind of weird, when you think about it. Here you are holding this physical book in your hands. Yet if you were to focus on the book’s material substance with an atomic microscope, you would see that you are holding nothing. As it turns out, we undergraduate biology majors were right about one thing—the quantum universe is mind-bending. Let’s look more closely at the “now you see it, now you don’t” nature of quantum physics. Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). When scientists study the physical properties of atoms, such as mass and weight, they look and act like physical matter. However, when the same atoms are described in terms of voltage potentials and wavelengths, they exhibit the qualities and properties of energy (waves). (Hackermüller, et al, 2003; Chapman, et al, 1995; Pool 1995) The fact that energy and matter are one and the same is precisely what Einstein recognized when he concluded that E = mc2. Simply stated, this equation reveals that energy (E) = matter (m, mass) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). Einstein revealed that we do not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium... Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.

Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of coyotes calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm—soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain—like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming good will, belying the expected tension of the coming days.

Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support. It will not require food,ammunition, or medical attention. It will not succumb to panic, desertion, or out-and-out mutiny. Like the virus that gave it life, this undead force will continue to grow, spreading across the body of this planet until there is nothing left to devour. Where would you go? What would you do?

Truly I have looked into the very heart of darkness, and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have traveled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to god as surely as the green, refreshing fields, and orchards.

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe. "This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation. "The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped--went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, 'That's life.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side if Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end. On

The sound of his anguish spiraled up into a desert night, across a vast spread of tiny stars. Through Shahrzad’s very skin. Without a word, Shahrzad took his hand and led him into the desert, far beyond the enclave of tents. When she finally turned to face him, Tariq appeared to have aged a decade in a matter of moments. They stared at each other across a small sea of glittering sand. Across years of friendship and trust, seemingly lost in an instant.

A real panic took hold of me. I didn't know where I was going. I ran along the docks, turned into the deserted streets in the Beauvoisis district; the houses watched my flight with their mournful eyes. I repeated with anguish: Where shall I go? where shall I go? Anything can happen. Sometimes, my heart pounding, I made a sudden right about turn: what was happening behind my back? Maybe it would start behind me and when I would turn around, suddenly, it would be too late. As long as I could stare at things nothing would happen: I looked at them as much as I could, pavements, houses, gaslights; my eyes went rapidly from one to the other, to catch them unawares, stop them in the midst of their metamorphosis. They didn't look too natural, but I told myself forcibly: this is a gaslight, this is a drinking fountain, and I tried to reduce them to their everyday aspect by the power of my gaze. Several times I came across barriers in my path: the Cafe des Bretons, the Bar de la Marine. I stopped, hesitated in front of their pink net curtains: perhaps these snug places had been spared, perhaps they still held a bit of yesterday's world, isolated, forgotten. But I would have to push the door open and enter. I didn't dare; I went on. Doors of houses frightened me especially. I was afraid they would open of themselves. I ended by walking in the middle of the street. I suddenly came out on the Quai des Bassins du Nord. Fishing smacks and small yachts. I put my foot on a ring set in the stone. Here, far from houses, far from doors, I would have a moment of respite. A cork was floating on the calm, black speckled water. "And under the water? You haven't thought what could be under the water." A monster? A giant carapace? sunk in the mud? A dozen pairs of claws or fins labouring slowly in the slime. The monster rises. At the bottom of the water. I went nearer, watching every eddy and undulation. The cork stayed immobile among the black spots.

We've always used stories as a way to pass on our history, as a way to explain things in life that we don't understand. We use them to make us feel connected to everything around us, and to help us escape to another time or place. Bookshops across the world are full of these stories. From travelling booksellers and undercover bookshops, to pop-up stalls and community hubs, walking into a good bookshop is like walking into another zone.These places are time machines, spaceships, story-makers, secret-keepers. They are dragon-tamers, dream-catchers, fact-finders and safe places. They are full of infinite possibilities, and tales worth taking home. Because whether we're in the middle of the desert or in the heart of a city, on the top of a mountain or on an underground train: having good stories to keep us company can mean the whole world.

Is this seat taken?" The deep, gravelly voice jolted Noelle from her blood-thirsty thoughts. When she laid eyes on the man it belonged to her breath caught in her throat. She blinked, wondering if maybe she'd dreamed him, but then he flashed her a captivating grin and she realized that he must be real - her mind wasn't capable of conjuring up a smile this heart-stoppingly gorgeous. A pair of vivid blue eyes watched her expectantly as she searched for her voice. "There are lots of other seats available," she finally replied, gesturing to the deserted tables all around them. He shrugged. "I don't want to sit anywhere but here." She moistened her suddenly dry lips. "Why?" "Because none of those other seats are across from you," he said simply.

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her—long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America. . . .

The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been. He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers into the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat or fat is placed in his mouth to sustain his soul on its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.

Did I ever tell you that my mother and father started out as pen pals? They wrote these long, unabashedly affectionate love letters to one another, peppered with clichés and pie-in-the-sky proclamations of eternal devotion. Despite my father’s eventual dishonesty and unfaithfulness, I have to believe he meant every word he wrote at that time, and it was admittedly romantic, uncovering my parents’ yellowed letters, all soft, crumbling corners and black ink stains, one rainy afternoon. Because how can anyone scrawl lies, really, in their own handwriting, the evidence of your own betrayal right in front of you? I sat cross-legged on the floor, holding my breath as I unfolded each letter, fragile and expectant, like a little girl opening her presents on Christmas morning. I sat there and soaked up my parents’ love for each other, and then I wondered where all those feelings had escaped to. I wondered where love went when it was lost—did it travel far, across miles and oceans and forests and deserts, or did it linger somewhere nearby, just waiting for a chance to be summoned again? Wherever it was, I could only hope it had ended up settling somewhere quieter, safer.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

As he observed her in musing silence, a novel thought occurred to him. It slipped through his mind so subtly that it seemed to mingle like smoke with his physical perceptions, with the way the dim light through the stained-glass window fell across her hair in little iridescent rainbows, and the scent of old tobacco and dust lingered in the room. He wondered — absurdly — if this was what she had come for — simply to sit in the stillness and be alive and share it with him. Something inside, something tiny he hadn’t even known was there, seemed to unfold, to spread tentative petals open like a desert flower sensing rain. She turned and looked up at him, her great unblinking eyes full of forest wisdom. He thought foolishly: Let me stay here. I need this.

He was completely detached from every thing except the story he was writing and he was living in it as he built it. The difficult parts he had dreaded he now faced one after another and as he did the people, the country, the days and the nights, and the weather were all there as he wrote. He went on working and he felt as tired as if he had spent the night crossing the broken volcanic desert and the sun had caught him and the others with the dry gray lakes still ahead. He could feel the weight of the heavy double-barreled rifle carried over his shoulder, his hand on the muzzle, and he tasted the pebble in his mouth. Across the shimmer of the dry lakes he could see the distant blue of the escarpment. Ahead of him there was no one, and behind was the long line of porters who knew that they had reached this point three hours too late. It was not him, of course, who had stood there that morning, nor had he even worn the patched corduroy jacket faded almost white now, the armpits rotted through by sweat, that he took off then and handed to his Kamba servant and brother who shared with him the guilt and knowledge of the delay, watching him smell the sour, vinegary smell and shake his head in disgust and then grin as he swung the jacket over his black shoulder holding it by the sleeves as they started off across the dry-baked gray, the gun muzzles in their right hands, the barrels balanced on their shoulders, the heavy stocks pointing back toward the line of porters. It was not him, but as he wrote it was and when someone read it, finally, it would be whoever read it and what they found when they should reach the escarpment, if they reached it, and he would make them reach its base by noon of that day; then whoever read it would find what there was there and have it always.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

In the Middle of This Century” In the middle of this century we turned to each other With half faces and full eyes like an ancient Egyptian picture And for a short while. I stroked your hair In the opposite direction to your journey, We called to each other, Like calling out the names of towns Where nobody stops Along the route. Lovely is the world rising early to evil, Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity, In the mingling of ourselves, you and I, Lovely is the world. The earth drinks men and their loves Like wine, To forget. It can’t. And like the contours of the Judean hills, We shall never find peace. In the middle of this century we turned to each other, I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me, The leather straps for a long journey Already tightening across my chest. I spoke in praise of your mortal hips, You spoke in praise of my passing face, I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey, I touched your flesh, prophet of your end, I touched your hand which has never slept, I touched your mouth which may yet sing. Dust from the desert covered the table At which we did not eat But with my finger I wrote on it The letters of your name.

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

Taking both of my hands, he pulls me into the tide. Salt water deepens the lavender satin of my gown to almost black. The waves push into it, making it heavier and heavier. “Tell me when,” he says. I nod. When Galen is neck deep and I’m clinging to him to keep my head above water. When my saturated prom dress feels like an anchor grasping at my limbs. When the moon is directly overhead and makes the silver flecks in his eyes shimmer like gems. That’s when I’m ready. “Now,” I breathe. He brushes his lips against mine. Once Twice. So soft it barely feels like anything. But it also feels like everything. He pulls me under. One day, when Galen and I are mated, I’ll be a princess. But I’ll never feel more like a princess than right now, in his arms, dancing on the ocean floor. He pulls my from my trance with his lips against me ear. “Emma.” It’s silly how my own name can send tingles shooting everywhere. “Hmm?” “I’ve been thinking. About us.” He pulls away from me. “I think…I think I need a distraction.” “Um. A distraction? From me?” The words taste vinegary in my mouth. They turn sweet again when Galen throws his head back and laughs. “Emma,” he says, brushing his thumb across my bottom lip. “You are the one thing I’m sure of. Completely. Without thinking twice. But I want to get away from here for a little while. And I want you to come with me. I know you’re set on going to college in the fall. I’m only asking for the summer. Let’s go somewhere. Do something.” I float up until I’m eye level with him. “Let’s. Where will we go?” He shrugs. “I don’t care, as long as it’s away from any ocean.” “So…the desert?” He grimaces. “The mountains?” I laugh. “Deal. We’ll go to the mountains.” “You’re sure?” I pull him by the neck until our noses touch. “Completely. Without thinking twice.

Alma knelt in the tall grass and brought her face as near as she could to the stone. And there, rising no more than an inch above the surface of the boulder, she saw a great and tiny forest. Nothing moved within this mossy world. She peered at it so closely that she could smell it- dank and rich and old. Gently, Alma pressed her hand into this tight little timberland. It compacted itself under her palm and then sprang back to form without complaint. There was something stirring about its response to her. The moss felt warm and spongy, several degrees warmer than the air around it, and far more damp than she had expected. It appeared to have its own weather. Alma put the magnifying lens to her eye and looked again. Now the miniature forest below her gaze sprang into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled. Just across this ocean- which was half the size of Alma's shawl- she found another continent of moss altogether. On this new continent, everything was different. This corner of the boulder must receive more sunlight than the other, she surmised. Or slightly less rain? In any case, this was a new climate entirely. Here, the moss grew in mountain ranges the length of Alma's arms, in elegant, pine tree-shaped clusters of darker, more somber green. On another quadrant of the same boulder still, she found patches of infinitesimally small deserts, inhabited by some kind of sturdy, dry, flaking moss that had the appearance of cactus. Elsewhere, she found deep, diminutive fjords- so deep that, incredibly, even now in the month of June- the mosses within were still chilled by lingering traces of winter ice. But she also found warm estuaries, miniature cathedrals, and limestone caves the size of her thumb. Then Alma lifted her face and saw what was before her- dozens more such boulders, more than she could count, each one similarly carpeted, each one subtly different. She felt herself growing breathless. 'This was the entire world.' This was bigger than a world. This was the firmament of the universe, as seen through one of William Herschel's mighty telescopes. This was planetary and vast. These were ancient, unexplored galaxies, rolling forth in front of her- and it was all right here!

Last Night’s Moon," “When will we next walk together under last night’s moon?” - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. — Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked moss that eats bones, keeps flesh; the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. — In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber boots on the sphagnum raft and learned love is soil–stronger than peat or sea– melting what it holds. The past is not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth, termite house, soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken pod scattering the debris of attention. Where you are while your body is here, remembering in the cold spring afternoon. The past is a long bone. — Time is like the painter’s lie, no line around apple or along thigh, though the apple aches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible line closest to touch. Lines of wet grass on my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back. All the history in the bone-embedded hills of your body. Everything your mouth remembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromide of desire darkening skin with light. — Disoriented at great depths, confused by the noise of shipping routes, whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain, a thousand miles through cold channels; clicking thrums of distant loneliness bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight, a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summer kitchen: feet bare on humid linoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’ pointillism, the infrasonic hum of the desert heard by the birds. The nighthawk spans the ceiling; swoops. Hot kitchen air vibrates. I look up to the pattern of stars under its wings.

I am totally lost in the folds of Love, totally free of worry and care. I have passed beyond the four qualities. My heart has torn away the veil of pretense. There was a time I circled with the nine spheres, rolling with the stars across the sky. There was a time I stayed by his side— I lived in his world and he gave me everything. With the best of intentions I became a prisoner in this form. How else did I get here? What crime did I commit? But I’d rather be in a prison with my Friend than in a rosegarden all alone. I came to this world To have a sight of Joseph’s purity. Like a baby born of its mother’s womb, I was brought here with blood and tears. People think they are born only once But they have been here so many times. In the cloak of this ragged body I have walked countless paths. How many times I have worn out this cloak! With ascetics in the desert I watched night turn into day. With pagans in the temple I slept at the foot of idols. I’ve been a charlatan and a king; I’ve been a healer, and fraught with disease. I’ve been on my death-bed so many times. . . . Floating up like the clouds Pouring down like the rain. As a darvish I sought the dust of annihilation but it never touched my robe. So I gathered armfuls of roses in this faded garden of existence. I am not of wind nor fire nor of the stormy seas. I am not formed out of painted clay. I am not even Shams-e Tabriz— I am the essence of laughter, I am pure light. Look again if you see me— It’s not me you have seen!

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?' 'No.' 'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.' 'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips. 'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.

He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead. In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been…..The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

What about this, then?” The metal surface rippled at his touch, stretching and splitting into a million thin wires that made it look like a giant version of one of those pin art toys Sophie used to play with as a kid. He tapped his fingers in a quick rhythm, and the pins shifted and sank, forming highs and lows and smooth, flat stretches. Sophie couldn’t figure out what she was seeing until he tapped a few additional beats and tiny pricks of light flared at the ends of each wire, bathing the scene in vibrant colors and marking everything with glowing labels. “It’s a map,” she murmured, making a slow circle around the table. And not just any map. A 3-D map of the Lost Cities. She’d never seen her world like that before, with everything spread out across the planet in relation to everything else. Eternalia, the elvin capital that had likely inspired the human myths of Shangri-la, was much closer to the Sanctuary than she’d realized, nestled into one of the valleys of the Himalayas—while the special animal preserve was hidden inside the hollowed-out mountains. Atlantis was deep under the Mediterranean Sea, just like the human legends described, and it looked like Mysterium was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. The Gateway to Exile was in the middle of the Sahara desert—though the prison itself was buried in the center of the earth. And Lumenaria… “Wait. Is Lumenaria one of the Channel Islands?” she asked, trying to compare what she was seeing against the maps she’d memorized in her human geography classes. “Yes and no. It’s technically part of the same archipelago. But we’ve kept that particular island hidden, so humans have no idea it exists—well, beyond the convoluted stories we’ve occasionally leaked to cause confusion.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets! Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.