Sara's Story - by Jonathan Malory - Chapter IX - The Ger

Sara wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but when she woke everyone knew everything about her, they had read the Note.

Furthermore, everyone could now speak English in varying imitations of Sara’s accent. At first she found it all quite amusing but it soon became obvious to her just how valuable the Note was. The most significant achievement was learning these Mongolian nomads’ language simply by having them write their names onto the Note.

In a matter of hours she knew them as intimately as if she had grown up with them out here in this never-ending expanse of ever-shifting sands, knew everything they knew about survival in their Gobi with its imposing personality, fascinating.

In the three weeks before she came to these people she honestly thought she might have appeared on a different planet, pollution-free skies dazzled her with super-blueness during the daytime while the huge night stars beguiled her like hypnotic stellar cats’ eyes watching her from afar.

Martian dust was kicked around her feet for step after step, lost in thoughts of benevolent entities. The timing was almost too accurate, if Nassan had not been there as she materialised into the shifting sands of the Gobi, where even natives are sometimes duped by singing sand dunes and never heard of again… Even the time of year was fortunate, Sara would have frozen to death almost immediately had her appearance been a few months earlier.

Now she was here, by the strangest act of Fate, amongst her own people that knew her as well as she knew herself. Of all the things they could have wanted to talk about, aeroplanes, space travel, computers, they now knew as much as she on these subjects, Jonathan Arkansas was on everyone’s mind.

The people of the Ger were torn between their love of Sara and their need for more information pertaining to Jonathan, in their mind the nomads were almost a much a part of Sara’s story as herself, they wanted her to return to England and somehow come back for them. They didn’t want to go with her for fear of catching whatever disease compels Sara to always return to the island, ultimately to enter the Door and continue the cycle.
But they had to know why Mister Arkansas was so loved by Angelica Platt and her friends from the other world. Even though she knew them like brother’s and sisters, Sara’s genetic make-up could still not fully grasp all the nuances of the nomads’ thinking, why they were more interested in Jonathan than the benevolent beings between our worlds, or, for that matter, the other world itself.

Sara had made herself stop reading the Note once she’d read everyone’s Name written in it, she could hardly think of anything else but the other world as she gazed across the Gobi’s endless expanse of uninhabited land, a world without fences.

Sara walked gently on the Gobi as she returned to the round Ger that had been her home. She saw flashes of the family erecting their home in various desert landscapes, a heavier version for winter and lighter for summer like they lived in now. The sun spread its low rays over red Martian mountains in the distance as the children played with the horses that lazed around the Ger. She hadn’t known places like this existed on Earth, in other circumstances she could easily live here indefinitely. That made her smile, what other circumstances would have seen Sara here at this time? When Sara stepped into the Ger, Nassan was waiting for her.

‘It’s time to go Sara,’ Sara thought he had to own the kindest face anyone had ever seen, ‘There are some tourists, dinosaur hunters, in their oversized American planet killing four by fours.’

Nassan had got that from one of her thoughts, she had been watching a programme about global warming and how America, with its enormous fuel consuming cars, was one of the major contributors. They were interviewing a young businessman in Boston, asking him why a city dweller needed a huge four-wheel-drive off-road vehicle. He’d said something about putting fear in the minds of other drivers and getting to work on time.

‘I will take you to them, they are friendly despite their obvious flaws, and they will take you to the city where you can contact Mister Arkansas and arrange your journey home.’

‘I know, Nassan it’s been…’ There wasn’t really anything to say, apart from ‘good lucks’, ‘take cares’; they knew each other too well for words, as did the rest of Nassan’s noble family who were waiting in a line outside the Ger with two horses ready to go.