Thunder dragged across the sky that day but no rain to ground the dust. Ajo tipped some of the silty stuff from his goggles. The heaviest clouds turned with storm in the air’s currents but pushed on over the mountains before they would loose a drop.
“They may be days ahead,” Ajo said.
The peaks of a jagged range hovered above the horizon on a shimmering skirt of silver-blue. He could now see them, barely, without his glass when the wind relented and the dust dropped. They were dark mountains of rock and sand with yellow edges glowing as obsidian does when held against the sky.
“There are signs,” said Osi.
True there were washes and basins in the desert floor and stretches of flat hardpan cracked into a mosaic of scales, white with salt and red with rust.
“Water flowed here.”
It was hard to say when though. Not this season and seemingly none recent. It could have been ages ago. But there was hope. There were breaks in the blinding dust. There were signs of flood under foot and overhead thunder-laden clouds labored to make the foothills somewhere out in the shimmer before letting go. There was the tell-tale charge in the air, the scent of imminent cloudburst, and that tinge awakening in Ajo’s tired joints that told him it surely must soon rain as if the ground was pulling for it.
Ajo knew little of this land and he didn’t know the seasons here if there were any. He knew nothing of the mountains ahead except that they could be a mirage. He knew only what he’s seen of the desert they’ve been crossing, surmising it was an ancient seabed, and now gathered they were getting close to its edge.
“Look,” said Osi pointing.
Black birds streamed in and circled a distant place searching for any dead thing the floods, or anticipation thereof, washed out of the ground or down from the heights.
“We should have a look-see,” said Osi.
A look would take them off course but Ajo agreed, “We must.” Ajo wondered in a long silence whether a moon’s, or moons’, tides ever had any pull here. So they changed course and to a string of knots Ajo carried in a pocket he tied a piece of black thread and frayed its ends.
“I should like to find a feather,” said Osi.
Their course change would take them out of the bowl of the sea floor and put them up on its cusp. It would give them a contrast, an ancient shoreline to follow, an altered vantage or at least a marked line on the terrain to reference. They both thought of the things they could use it for should they be fortunate enough to find a black feather. Ajo carried a few pieces of parchment in his pack and Osi kept a long scroll in a bottle. The thought of the luxury of making ink again puddled in Osi’s mind as they set off on their slow climb out of the desert.
Ajo had been careful to keep a sense of direction as the land provided no marks but for the mirage of the mountain that appeared on their horizon several sleeps ago. Before they slept Ajo placed his gear in the shape of an arrow and carved lines on the ground to indicate their direction of travel when they woke. And each time they woke Ajo tied another knot in a string which was the only track of time they kept, each space between knots a waking day and each knot a sleep. To the space when Osi pointed to the sight of the first yellow mountain peak Ajo tied, by a strand of purple thread, a charm made of bone. They had yet to see the color of the sun or the sky with the constant cover of cloud. And the clouds seemed never to carry in any regular direction nor move with constant speed. Sometimes they didn’t go anywhere, but churned overhead in a boil. Now, ever since the mountains appeared, the clouds looked intent to drift off in that direction. This was the first time Ajo bothered to retrieve his spyglass since Osi’s bone charm. Until the mountains arrived over the horizon, and now the black birds swirling yonder in the gray, there was nothing on which the eye could get a fix.
“I’d give half a leg to hear water run or a brook babble over rock.”
“Or a tooth to chew a stalk of grass.”
It was the first wishful thing they’d spoken since they dropped into the desert.
Photo by ekrem osmanoglu on Unsplash