Jafar looked around him. Cari had set her master down beside his daughter, and now the three of them stood in a shallow valley among the sand, creosote brush and thorn bushes, with nothing to see but desolation in all directions. Even the Tirghiz Mountains to the north were lost in the shimmers of heat rising from the rock and parched soil. “Are you all right?” Jafar asked Selima.
“I landed without even feeling a bump,” the girl replied. “Even as insubstantial as I am, I can still stand and sit on things; otherwise, I guess, I’d fall right through the ground to the core of the earth.”
Jafar was glad his daughter had not suffered from her fall, but that was the only thing he had to be glad about. The three of them were stranded in the desert without food, water, or transportation, and sti
