... He set off to climb a nearby sand dawan, scaling to the top of a great ridge that wound a sinuous, wind-sculpted path to the south. When he reached the crest he was rewarded by the vision of an endless sea of sand, stretching away from him to the horizon with the coming of the dawn. The ocher crests of sand were crowned in tawny swathes of glittering gold as the sunlight washed over the landscape. The dunes rose and fell in a series of undulating waves, deepening at the troughs to shades of amethyst purple before descending into shadow. They extended in all directions, for as far as his eye could see and he gaped at the scene, enchanted with the majestic stillness and serene majesty of the desert.

   All of the stories were wrong, he thought. All of the tales of horror and hungry ghosts and demons that would claw their way up from ancient lost cities hidden beneath the sands were wrong! As he looked at the land now, he sensed the tranquil silence of the place, the vast natural beauty that was as varied and random as the blue-white clouds above, yet possessed of an inner rhythm that shaped and contoured the sculpted dunes as though they had been fashioned by the hand of some unseen artist. The serenity of the desert seemed to reach into his very soul, quieting and comforting...

   Looking on the dunes, he was struck with a vital awareness of the endless connection of all things. Here were the sands that had once held forth on the high majestic peaks of the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains to the north, or the purple shrouded mystery of the Pamirs to the west, or again the ragged heights of the Kunlun Shan south, or the great Himalayas beyond. And look how the soul of the mountains remains in them, he thought! The sands had arrayed themselves once more in vast ridges, mirroring the stony ranges on every side, as though they yearned to recover the grandeur they once knew in the mountains. Here they slept, a silent echo of the ancestral stone they were born from, and Drekk found a resonance with them, reaching back through the ages to take the barest hold on something old, and ancient and holy that was the very source of his own being.

   Here in this immeasurable, vacant expanse of rolling sands he seemed the only living thing on earth, a solitary, sentient being that had been brought here to bear witness to all of this, and know the subtle but sure connection that joined all things to a certainty. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of the desert sands and the barest tinge of salt in the air. At once he imagined the great oceans beyond the mountains south—measureless, swells of water that flowed in jade green waves with crests of foam and brine, the liquid, living counterpart to the silent waves of sand about him. The hand of the artist was seen in all things, he concluded, in the  great oceans, and high mountains, and here in this boundless sea of sand that seemed to blend the essential qualities of each. To look upon it all was the most humbling experience of his life, for he seemed to know himself now on another level, and suddenly felt himself to be ancient beyond his ken, and connected as well to everything around him...

Drekk Gazes on the Taklamakan -  Copyright (c) 2001 John A. Schettler

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