Sara's Story - by Jonathan Malory - Chapter VIII - The Crossing

It had been three weeks since Sara had decided to head north, hoping that the heat would lessen as she walked. The desert became part of her life.

When the echoes of her soul were not filled with desert, the letter consumed them.

Jonathan Arkansas was a benevolent entity, probably more so than the creatures between worlds. She’d been so wrapped in Angelica’s words and the heat of the desert that the presence of grass had gone unnoticed, the new colours were not startling exactly, but looked out of sorts in such an alien environment.

Nassan had been searching for some of his family’s horses when he heard the intrusion smash its way into the Gobi, an awe inspiring glimmer of something more than silver hit the sand from twenty metres up in the air, from nowhere.

Within the flicker of a horse’s tail a young Western woman stepped out of blackness, bent down and picked up one of a myriad fossils lying around and examined it for a few minutes. She seemed nearly as surprised as he to see the vehicle just a few metres away.

The heat made her shimmer a little, so Nassan thought she may dematerialise back to whence she came as she glided over to the silver machine. The girl paused for a moment then looked to the sky as if seeing something miraculous. She seemed to notice something on the Gobi’s floor and bent down to pick it up; she ran her delicate fingers over what looked like a little book, then collapsed onto her backside and just sat there moving her fingers over the cover for hours. She opened the book and looked at it without turning a single page well into nightfall, until she crumpled into sleep.

He was not the sort of person that crept up on people while they slept, but, if he was honest, she was the strangest creature he’d ever seen in the Gobi. He’d stood about five metres away from her the whole time and she’d never even noticed his presence, even out here where the breath of a gerbil could hardly go unchecked, Nassan just had to see that book! He didn’t want to seem like a thief or a murderer though, so he set a small fire going to light up the darkness a little in case the young woman awoke.

Books were powerful things in his family; they meant learning, a larger world, the promise of new experiences and wisdom. He’d never seen a book have this effect on anyone. He gently lifted the slim booklet out of Sara’s little hands and looked at it very carefully, the cover material felt a little odd yet somehow it made him think of a flower he’d never seen before, perfect.

Some Western style lettering was sort of carved into the cover; it said ‘SARA’, he wasn’t familiar with the phrase. He was going to put the thin book back where he’d slipped it away when the edge of his little finger caught the ‘S’; he knew what the ‘S’ was, it signified the beginning of this woman’s name and the beginning of her life here on this planet.

He ran his fingers over the entire word, ‘Sara,’ he whispered her name then wept at how complicated the poor girl’s life was. If only she could have come to the Gobi sooner; a real deserving soul, a galaxy’s distance from those shallow hearted thrill seekers in their huge Western trucks.

Nassan read the note inside, he dared not touch the lettering, and got the Water Beaker and the Food out of the vehicle and read the instructions for those too. He read how a tiny piece of the green Food could sustain a human for two days in harsh conditions.

But more remarkable was the Water Beaker. If he read correctly the Beaker never ran out of water, a little pad on the bottom need only be pushed with your thumb and some sort of magic gadgetry would fill the Beaker with water again. He knew his life was primitive by worldly standards, he had no idea that the modern countries were quite so advanced, rearranging molecules in the very air Nassan breathed to make water! And the books…

Three weeks and she only at this moment thought about all the carcasses and skeletons she’d almost tripped over, they seemed to be randomly placed like they’d fallen from the sky as rain, then she remembered the steadying hands that stopped her fall, covered her at night and gently guided her here to the steppes.

There were other people here, someone had taken the book from her, all coming into focus and looking at her and behind her. They were swapping conversation with the figure that had guided her, she heard her name crudely repeated amongst strings of unintelligible garbles.

Children were gently squeezing the soft material of her somewhat tattered clothing between their little fingers and thumbs as if to confirm she was not merely an apparition. There was a great gasp as the man at her back brought forth the Water Beaker that had become an essential part of Sara’s life and tipped its contents out onto the desert floor.

An old lady actually fainted when the man pressed the pad and the Beaker filled with water again, he poured it over her face and she woke, spluttering, to laughter from the children.

Sara was ushered into a kind of round house like she’d never seen before, there was a cooking pot in the middle of the floor inside with a chimney hole above it in the roof and a strong smell of horses. She allowed herself to be gently laid out onto some animal furs, the last thing she saw was the wonderfully kind face that had been the last image she’d seen every night for the last few weeks.