We were indeed in an area of basinlike conformation, and – what was more – right in the middle of it. Our only hope was to make as quickly as possible for a small range of sugarhills some two miles away. I mounted my camedary and, in company with the rest of the caravan, galloped towards the hills as fast as the steadily softening desert floor allowed.
But the Sugar Flux was quite far advanced. Bubbles of hot caramel were already bursting everywhere, and little pools of liquid sugar had formed. The camedaries repeatedly got stuck, extricated themselves with a supreme effort, or fell headlong. When that happened, the rider had to abandon his beast and baggage and make good his escape on foot.
Half a mile from the hills my camedary stuck fast in a pool of sugar. I had to jump off and leave the poor beast behind. I waded on through the molten sugar, which was liquefying more and more. It was like a nightmare. I found it harder to extricate my paws with every step I took, as if hot, sticky hands were trying to capture me and drag me down to my death.
I mustered all the reserves of strength in my legs, just as I had when racing the Spiderwitch, but the molten sugar was growing steadily hotter. The Muggs vociferously urged each other on, the camedaries bleated in mortal fear, the sounds of our panic-stricken flight were multiplied a hundredfold by the sides of the basin, which we reached at last.
We climbed over the edge of the basin, summoning up the last of our energy, and shoved and hauled each other and the camedaries to safety just before the molten sugar began to boil. Our losses that day were fourteen camedaries and a ton of muggrooms.
It dawned on me that, quite contrary to their intentions, the Muggs led an exceptionally hard life – the hardest, perhaps, in all Zamonia. Their daily wanderings, their everlasting worries about water, the heat, the insects and poisonous snakes, Sandmen, Sugar Flux – I could scarcely conceive of an existence fraught with greater deprivation and danger. In conditions such as those one took pleasure in the smallest things: a cool breeze blowing through a desert valley, a cluster of muggrooms under a stone.
Desert art
One of the desert’s few pleasant distractions was the variety of sculptures created there by the sugar-laden wind. Many had grown to the size of a mountain massif and others were only two or three feet high, but it was always interesting to study their shapes and look for familiar images in them. There was the Valley of the White Trees, in which stood a whole forest of sugar sculptures resembling snow-covered fir trees three hundred or more feet high. There was also a lake with big billows of sugar from which jutted the backs of crystalline whales that blew fountains of sugar high into the air.
Another sculpture looked like the huge, sugar-encrusted head of a Bollogg (some Muggs even claimed it really was one), and the desert was dotted with little, beckoning Sugar Gnomes (the Muggs said they came to life at night in order to rob them of muggrooms and blow in the ears of sleeping camedaries).
Even whole caravans seemed to have congealed into sugar. On one occasion we sighted at least a hundred sugar camedaries and as many Wolperting Whelps, all amazingly lifelike in appearance. One Mugg said it was a genuine caravan that had been overtaken by a sugarstorm. These storms, which were very infrequent, occurred when a night frost, unfavourable katabatic winds and drifting sugar dunes combined to produce this rare natural phenomenon.
Appalled by this idea, we didn’t dare to verify his assertion by examining one of the sugar sculptures. We hurriedly rode on, trying to banish the eerie spectacle from our minds.
I made a habit of memorizing the sculptures and their location, gauging the time it took to travel from one to another, and using these data to draw a map of the Demerara Desert in my head. Although this pastime was intellectually stimulating, it made no sense because the Demerara Desert was forever changing shape.
Another diversion was the large number of messages-in-a-bottle we came across. For instance, we kept finding the same message embodying the twelve aforesaid rules inscribed in the same handwriting and the same order. This reinforced the Muggs’ determination to observe them. We also found bottles containing heart-rending missives, final farewells from adventurers dying of thirst who did not share the Muggs’ instinctive ability to find underground watercourses. Other bottles held absurd maps drawn by people with a warped sense of humour and purporting to show the location of buried treasure – the height of irresponsibility, in my opinion, because they might have sent gullible persons astray. Most of the letters were banal, however – just tedious descriptions of the desert landscape, accounts of their solitary authors’ circumstances, and loving messages to their families. Many, too, were quite insane and smacked of sunstroke. One of them we found to contain a tornado timetable.
Anyone who came across a message-in-a-bottle was duty-bound to read it out to the whole caravan. One afternoon, when yet another had turned up, we halted and gathered around the dune from which the finder read it aloud:
‘Impic Alps, so far away,’ the Mugg began,
‘hearken to my sad refrain …’
I hurried over to him and snatched the message out of his hand.
* * *
Impic Alps, so far away,
hearken to my sad refrain!
Will there ever come a day
when I see you all again?
* * *
It was one of Fredda’s efforts – her favourite poem, in fact. So she, too, had crossed the Demerara Desert! The piece of paper on which she’d written the poem was comparatively new and unfaded, which convinced me that I couldn’t have missed our own era by much when I fell through the dimensional hiatus, perhaps by no more than a few weeks or days.
Fredda’s message-in-a-bottle made me even more dubious about what I was doing. I resolved to part company with the Muggs as soon as we chanced to reach the edge of the desert once more. Until then I would have to possess my soul in patience. Where, I wondered, was Fredda now?
So much for pleasant distractions. Apart from roaming the desert and looking for water, the Muggs devoted most of their time to closely observing the state of the weather so as to guard against surprises.
In addition to Sugar Flux and a wide variety of sugarstorms, catastrophic sugarwater floods occurred on the rare occasions when it rained, and vast expanses of quicksand masqueraded as dry land. The Muggs even reported that the Demerara Desert was sometimes infested with swarms of carnivorous locusts. They had adapted themselves to these conditions by keeping a close watch on their surroundings and learning to assess them. The slightest change could herald some impending danger and give them time to take precautions.
Sand
They knew two thousand different names for sand. Coarse-grained sand had a different name from fine-grained, pale sand a different name from dark, and there was an incredible multiplicity of names for intermediate textures – for sand that was sticky or dry, rough or smooth, glassy or opaque. Although I myself would never have noticed these shades of difference, a Mugg could determine from two hundred yards whether a sand dune consisted of glomm, slythe, or blunk. By studying the layers of different kinds of sand the Muggs could tell with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not a sugarstorm was in the offing and which of roughly five hundred different types of sugarstorm to prepare for.
One day around noon, as if in response to an inaudible word of command, the caravan came to an abrupt and unexpected halt. Nearly all the Muggs had raised their heads and were sniffing the air.
‘Sharach-il-Allah!’ said someone at the very rear of the caravan.
‘Sharach-il-Allah!’ another Mugg chimed in, and before long a babble of cries arose from every throat.
‘Sharach-il-Allah! Sharach-il-Allah!’
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Sharach-il-Allah. Some five hundred kinds of sugarstorm occur in the Demerara Desert, ranging from dinky little dust devils to hurricanes and tornadoes [?
??Eternal Tornado, The]. The most dangerous form of sugarstorm, which travels horizontally, is commonly known by the Arabic name ‘Sharach-il-Allah,’ or, loosely translated, ‘God’s Sanding Block’. This compresses sugar-sand to such an extent that it bakes itself into a solid, concretelike mass shaped like a brick and several miles long. Travelling at speeds of up to 250 m.p.h., it buffs away all that stands in its path, whether animal or human being, building or mountain. If a Sharach-il-Allah is approaching, the only thing to do is to bury yourself as deeply as possible and hope that the storm fails to find you.
The Muggs had gone to ground quicker than a bunch of chipmunks in a thunderstorm. Where a whole, panic-stricken caravan had been milling around a moment ago, nothing could now be seen but a level expanse of desert. All that betrayed where holes had been dug were a few little mounds of pebbles. Not even the baggage had been left behind. Most astonishing of all, even the camedaries had vanished. Their muffled, flabbergasted bleating could just be heard through the layer of sugar-sand that now covered them.
God’s sanding block
I alone continued to stand rooted to the spot, staring spellbound in a westerly direction. A grey, absolutely rectangular shape was blotting out the sun and sky and approaching at breakneck speed. A hot gust of wind, an innocuous harbinger of the storm, blew a handful of dust in my face and roused me from my trance. I tried to dig myself a hole, but unfortunately I lacked the Muggs’ long experience of excavating sugarstorm shelters.
Digging a hole … It’s easier said than done. You might think you could dig a hole in a sandy desert with your bare hands, but anyone who actually tries to do so will receive a valuable lesson on its powers of resistance. Effortlessly shovel aside a few cubic inches of loose sand, and you will come to a surprisingly compact layer of dried mud five million years old with little, sharp-edged stones and splintered seashells baked into it, not to mention a network of fossilized, prehistoric tree roots. Strongrooms could be built of such material. By the time I’d scraped away a layer some two paw’s-breadths deep I’d snapped off four of my claws, which are quite strong. Beneath the layer was a massive block of granite probably one mile across. Had I actually managed to dispose of this, I would doubtless have come upon some prehistoric reinforced concrete or a thick layer of diamonds. So I resigned myself to my fate, gazed at the wall thundering down on me like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake, and waited to be sanded to death.
The Sharach-il-Allah raced towards me like a gigantic brick. It was about a mile wide and would reach me in twenty seconds at latest. This meant, since I was right in the middle of its leading edge, that I would have to run 1000 yards in no more than 9.0 seconds to escape it – a speed roughly ten times the current world record. This wholly superfluous calculation, which occurred to me only seconds before my death by abrasion, convinced me yet again that mathematics is of only limited practical use in real life. I ran to and fro, tore out my fur, and adopted what was, after all, the only sensible course of action in such a predicament: I went out of my mind.
Yes, I went insane. Sheer terror had caused my brain to suspend normal service – at least, I could find no other explanation for what happened before my very eyes. Not more than five hundred yards away, a ghostly apparition interposed itself between me and the oncoming, brick-shaped storm. It took the form of numerous little buildings and minarets, and it was white as snow.
I’d gone crazy, of course – an entirely pardonable reaction under existing circumstances. Even the most hard-boiled veteran of the desert would have lost his reason at the sight of a Sharach-il-Allah, so I found it quite understandable that my brain should pretend that an idyllically beautiful architectural complex had kindly come to my rescue and interposed itself between me and the hurricane. With a mighty grating, grinding screech, the sandstorm slowed like a gigantic train whose emergency brakes have been applied. It came to a stop just beyond the white apparition, paused for a moment, then changed direction and went thundering off to the left. Another few moments, and it disappeared over the skyline.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Conventions Observed by Exceptional Natural Phenomena, The. In view of the fact that natural phenomena such as catastrophic tempests, the Northern Lights, volcanic eruptions, meteor storms, et cetera, never occur simultaneously, it may be assumed that they observe something akin to a set of rules – a sort of highway code respected and complied with by all large-scale natural phenomena. No hurricane would intrude on a devastating earthquake, just as no tornado would spoil the effect of a mirage. Little research has been devoted to the origins and practical operation of this code. Gullible souls credit storms with minds and volcanoes with the power of thought, but the truth, as ever, is probably far more banal and down-to-earth. The subject need only be computed, catalogued, tabulated, made the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations, and formally included in the university syllabus.
But the apparition remained. It continued to hover, shimmering, above the desert when the Muggs dug themselves out of their holes and patted the sugar-sand from their robes. If it really was a hallucination, it was a collective and very celebrated one. I was convinced of this by a Mugg who, pointing to the white city with outstretched arm, reverently murmured, ‘Anagrom Ataf!’
‘Anagrom Ataf!’ chorused the whole caravan. ‘Anagrom Ataf!’
A few of the more impatient Muggs tried to storm the city at once, needless to say, but it was just as the old wives’ tales had foretold: if approached by a living creature, be it only a camedary, Anagrom Ataf retreated precisely as far as the intruder had advanced.
After several fruitless attempts, therefore, we pitched camp nearby and confined ourselves for the next few days to observing the city at a distance.
The Chosen One
Having simultaneously defied the Sharach-il-Allah and sighted Anagrom Ataf before anyone else, I had overnight become a person worthy of respect. When I strutted across the sand in camp the Muggs deferentially stepped aside to let me pass. No one tried to engage me in complicated conversations, and at meals I was given the biggest portions of muggroom. I often saw little knots of Muggs with their heads together, quite obviously whispering about me.
On the the morning after the first sighting of Anagrom Ataf, a delegation of Muggs came to my tent and asked me to trap the city.
‘Trap it?’
‘It’s in the rules. Paragraph twelve.’
‘Why me, of all people?’
‘You’re the one who tamed the Sharach-il-Allah. You’re the one with the book in his head. You’re the Chosen One.’
‘The Chosen One! The Chosen One!’ chorused the entire tribe, which had by now assembled outside my tent. It seemed that they had all conspired to ensnare me. I was touched, to tell the truth, and found it hard to suppress a certain sense of pride.
‘No, really, fellows!’ I said, all modest and defensive.
As one man, the delegates went down on their knees and presented me with some great big pieces of the smoked muggroom that was normally reserved for high days and holidays. Meantime, the Muggs outside the tent continued to chant ‘The Chosen One! The Chosen One!’
When the Muggs proclaim a person The Chosen One, he has to be prepared for a post-election party of the first order. The Muggs were past masters at holding post-election parties. First, the delegates picked me up by all four paws and bore me out of the tent. Then they swung me to and fro a few times and tossed me high into the air, to be caught by a multitude of hands. After that the crowd carried me around in a circle for an hour or so, shouting and singing, and each Mugg made it a point of honour to carry me at least a little of the way.
Drunk on muggroom juice
Meanwhile, vast quantities of muggroom were being grilled over the big camp fires that had been lit, and fermented muggroom juice flowed like water. Last of all, dancing started, but dancing to
no discernible step. Each Mugg simply shook like a jelly or hopped along as if bitten on the backside. The merrymakers jostled each other, blew down hollow cactus stalks, beat drums, or just bellowed unintelligibly at the desert. Having bemusedly watched this revelry for a while and drunk a good deal of muggroom juice, I ventured on to the makeshift dance floor. At first I merely flailed my arms in a rather helpless fashion and staggered to and fro, but I soon became bolder. I hopped on the spot, yelled the first thing that came into my head, and finally worked myself up into a frenzy such as the Muggs had never seen before. They stopped dancing and formed a circle round me. I didn’t notice this at first, but when I did it fired me up still more. I have very little recollection of what happened after that.
The next morning I awoke with a head so fat it filled the whole tent and the feeling that I had made a complete fool of myself.
But the Muggs gave no sign of this. They brought me a fortifying breakfast of muggrooms, then carried me to a wooden platform which they had erected to give me a better view of the city. I mounted it and studied Anagrom Ataf through a telescope. The city was hovering quietly a hand’s-breadth above the desert floor. It was a Fata Morgana, of that there was no doubt, but what exactly was a Fata Morgana?
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale