That desert... Oh yes, that desert! Such a cruel hit for someone accustomed to mild climate - at first! Wild heat during the day, dry, pondering heat, they said it was better than the wetter, tropical oven-like exhaustion, but! At least when there's water in the air, the water inside one's own self makes contact with the air. The dry air, smell-less, deserted air of high altitude, and that heat - enough to drive one insane with lack of anything. Breathe, yes, the breath was getting lost at first because it had little to breathe with.
And at night, the temperature dropped to the other side of the thermometer (the trusty Swedish model, Celcius-scale). Quickly - from dry frying pan around everywhere - to dry cold of a food-vault.
So! Still, the desert! Oft-times it had the luring of a snowdrift - as they used (back home) to tell tales of weary travellers who stopped feeling anything, despaired, and slept into the snow.
Back in the North, one could lie on the earth and become one with it. Here, the pulse of earth's life was hidden below the soil's crust, or did ooze thinly through whatever survived in the desert. Actually, the desert was full of earth-life, it was thick of that, but it was different, it was raw essence, much like essence of a woman, but not the refined, lively vegetation of a Northern forest. It was full and raw. Engulfing, suffocating in its blindness.
He's gotten accustomed to making mental notes for himself and speaking (and explaining)
to friends, to those same friends he's gotten tired of conversing with, to those same people he's grown weary of during all those days of hermitage - to those same people who were torturing now by their ineptitude, but their lack of tact... Ah heck, whoever they used to call savages, could be way more understanding than this... these, those civilised greysuits.Of course, few of them actually wore grey suits.
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