[ Mindscapes ]

[unflagging]

His mind is vast and contains within it multitudes of environments and geographies. In some places are fields and forests, in others snow and hills, in others teeming cities, in others silent towers. It changes, it varies, it is immense.

This is merely the part into which one has stepped: a desert not so unlike the deserts found in the American West and Southwest of our own world--dry, wild, temperamental, difficult, cut with highways, haunted by travelers. The weather is changeable and harsh, with roiling clouds and vicious storms rising up almost unexpectedly, night falls suddenly and hard and the starts themselves are vicious and alien, and sunlight (when there's any to be seen) is harsh and raw. To tell the truth, it's darker more than it's light. And the storms are remarkable, like something from the end of the world.

The dark shapes of cars glide by from time to time on the roads and highways, going somewhere. Crows circle endlessly, perching in dark huddles on the telephone wires at whiles. There are howls and laughs and screams out in the hills and cliffs.

There are vast washes of pale sand to be found in the dark, the whole struck through with spiked bloodred cliffs and stones in alien geometries. There are scorched and burned and abandoned houses here and there.

Go far enough and there are ruined cities of every description to be found if a traveler wanders far enough and happens to find them: ancient walled cities with turrets and towers, gleaming concrete and steel cities of the modern era, cities formed of mud, cities formed of glass.

There might be something to find here. Or something might find a traveler here.

"Bone palings ruled the small and dusty purlieus here and death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape. Strange fences that the sand and wind had scoured and the sun bleached and cracked like old porcelain with dry brown weather cracks and where no life moved."

"They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless voice and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them."

"It was a lone tree burning in the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he kelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies companies of lesser auxilaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegaroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon; a constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the icy desert stars in their sockets. ... When the sun rose, he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog. The storm had long passed off to the south and the new sky was raw and blue and the spire of smoke from the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus marking the hour with its particular and faintly breathing shadow upon the face of a terrain that was without other designation. All the creatures that had been at vigil with him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur."

"They crossed a vast dry lake with dead volcaones ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the south lay broken shapes of scoria in a lava bed as far as they eye could see. Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself into whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience."

"On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed... They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell and they climbed up through a low range of barren granite hills to a stark promontory... A gravel flat stretched away to the horizon. Far to the south beyond the black volcanic hills lay a lone albino ridge, sand or gypsum, like the back of some pale seabeast surfaced among the dark achipelagos."

"They rode all day upon a pale gastine sparsely grown with saltbush and panicgrass. In the evening they entrained upon a hollow ground that rang so roundly under the horses' hooves that they stepped and sidled and rolled their eyes like circus animals and that night as they lay in that ground each heard, all heard, the dull boom of rock falling somewhere far below them in the awful darkness inside the world. ... On the day that followed they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no track upon it. The riders wore masks of boneblack smeared about their eyes and some had blacked the eyes of their horses. The sun reflected off the pan burned the undersides of their faces and shadow of horse and rider alike were painted upon the fine white powder in purest indigo. Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin? ... That night they say at the fire like ghosts in their dusty beards and clothing, rapt, pyrolatrous. The fires died and small coals scampered down the plain and sand crept past in the dark all night like armies of lice on the move. In the night some of the horses began to scream and daybreak found several so crazed with snowblindness that they required to be shot."