In the morn­ing, the wind is cool and the sun keeps below the crest of the dunes ahead of them. As the sun rises in the sky the wind becomes hot­ter and hot­ter.

The river of peo­ple flows up a dune, and far to the east Gil sees a strange sight: a cur­tain in the sky.

It is a swath of grayish-yellow hov­er­ing above the hori­zon, a bit left of the sun’s ris­ing cir­cle. At first it looks almost like a darker exten­sion of the desert into the sky. Gil squints, and sees that the cur­tain moves, swirling like the wind—and yet it seems to stay in one place.

Gil
What is that?
Jaruna
A sharuq.

 

Kiddu
What’s a sharuq?
Jaruna
That is a sharuq.
Kiddu
Aha­ha­haha, no seri­ously, what is it? Like a sand­storm?
Jaruna
In a man­ner of speak­ing.
Gil
And why are we headed there?
Jaruna
Hmph! Why do you two ask so many ques­tions?

 

Kiddu
Come on, man. Now I just want to know more.
Jaruna
Do you Akka­di­ans not know the say­ing, He who keeps his eyes only upon his des­ti­na­tion shall surely stray from the path?
Kiddu
That’s a lame say­ing.
Jaruna
I rather like it. And besides, the sharuq is a secret. It would be unseemly to reveal its nature.
Kiddu
But it’s not like we won’t find out even­tu­ally!
Jaruna
I sup­pose I would rather wait until the last pos­si­ble minute to reveal it. After all, you still might turn out to be Akka­dian spies.
Kiddu
Now you’re just being obnox­ious.

Back • Next