a crisis of time

    Paranormal urban fiction     After rebirth       Whats the last thing you remember? , she asked. I took a few seconds to think about it. (flashback) nile river scenery:        Do you think we will ever get across this desert.         Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Whats the last thing you remember? , she asked. I took a few seconds to think about it. (flashback) nile river scenery:        Do you think we will ever get across this desert.         Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.         If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Whats the last thing you remember? , she asked. I took a few seconds to think about it. (flashback) nile river scenery:        Do you think we will ever get across this desert.         Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.     Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness. Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.         If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.   It was the fourth day of the lunar month when in the evening I noticed that the herd seemed more than a bit under count. I rushed to sanga to report but his curtains were closed signaling that he should not be disturbed. Feeling this was rather serious I shouted sanga as I pushed through the curtains to see what must have been a weird kind of n***d riding practice that Conchita was doing, with sanga as the horse back. What was even more strange was she was making weird noises with her body glistening with wetness.   Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?      Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Focus on the light, twice as bright In heights at times You look too close and you’re blind Touch the essence of mind And you’ll uncover what’s inside   Etched above a monogram were these words. Words of lore. Words that meant something to someone at some point in time. But for karim and eliza, on their wedding day, they didn’t think too much of it. Today was a celebration of love not a whose clues adventure. And you may kiss the bride. And kiss the bride he did. He knew he would get her pregnant. And he thought he knew just the way. But today in the height of her happiness, he’d focus.     Do you think we will ever get across this desert.     Barrage pulled the hammer back on the pistol he was holding above my head and pulled the trigger. There was a flash and then I felt nothing. For a while there was only darkness, then as my thoughts began to drift off and the last of my hearing went, I saw a bright light but not a sky of light, it looked like somebody had a lantern a mile away, I kept walking towards the light but though the light didn’t seem to be moving, I wasn’t getting any closer. I stopped walking and started focusing on the light in this dark place and wondered what this was , where I must be and where is my beloved eliza, then the light was directly in front of me but it seemed like it was me that moved towards the light in a matter of a blink the of an eye. It was indeed a lantern burning its last bit of embers but there was no one holding it and no sign of anyone leaving it there. I wondered what this meant. As the lantern gave up the flame I closed my eyes and thought real hard about my love and it was as if immediately I was transported to her. She was outside by the garden of roses and lilies that we started in spring and after two attempts had only just managed to sprout a few small ones, the patch of dirt wasn’t accommodating to with lilies or roses and I had promised to get some advice from the flower lady at the market but never did. She seemed to be crying as she knelt in the garden staring at the flowers, I stood for a while longer by the foyer to give her a moment but as if she felt my presence she looked up and turned to look at the foyer where I was standing and as if bewildered took a moment to take in what she was looking at before she ran towards me like never before. More tears streaming down her face. She said nothing, just hugged me like her life depended on it and as she moved to kiss me, her words were, you are dead. Aren’t you?    This was all the words that were said for what must have been the better part of forever but they were enough to bring back the picture of my quarrel with sanga and what had led to a run in with his boys, some very elaborate beating and my fortuitous escape for a few yards where I was grabbed and thrown in the back of a blue van, taken to my house and then my hang hut and shot and killed. No sign of my eliza and our puppy chuck. I had reluctantly followed in the trade of my father except I decided on a hut to hang the leather to dry not more than 500 yards away from the house. This is where I spent most of the little time that I spent away from my eliza. We had been talking marriage for over a year but it was she who wanted everything perfect and her quest for perfection led to indecisiveness on everything that led to procrastinating and a year of talking about marriage mostly with good feelings but never without a sting of regret as to why couldn’t I be more like my father and take charge of everything and what I said is final. I was my mother’s son and what I lacked in stiffneckedness I made up for with a quick wit. We spoke of having children, she wanted 3 and I wanted 3 dozen but when the time came she couldn’t after a miscarriage and it became the big white elephant in all our rooms. I sometimes wondered if she thought I was delaying getting married because she couldn’t have children, truth is she was the one delaying the marriage. In so many ways she was the perfect match for me, my soulmate, but I did not kid myself. I needed at least a son to carry on the legacy. Our love making was pure passion and I was almost certain that she would conceive just from the level of passion we expressed with each other.   Karim, she called out to me. Karim come here to me. Did you put this rose under the covers. It pricked my finger just now. Here let me see. Mmmm, I kiss it for you. Better, no its not, why would you put a thorny rose under the covers. Come on lizzy, I was trying to be romantic. Thorns aren’t romantic my love. Depends on how you look at it, I replied. Well what do you mean mr smarty pants. If you think about it, the thorns are there to protect the delicate little roses just the way I am here to protect my delicate little flower, you.     Wandering aimlessly around the cows, neither counting nor really noticing them, I thought of what my apprenticeship might mean if sanga decided to make a part of the g**g. I had begun to realize that raiding caravans was not all they did. In fact the village was depending on this band of outlaws for protection in more ways than one. Taxes were due and despite the bad harvest more than half of all corn or cattle could be snatched up if taxes were not paid. The tax collectors, though from out of town, usually came with a local party to collect taxes and seek out stores where the grain was kept. It was for this very reason that the band of bandits with sanga at the head were here for, and it turned out that these raided caravans were usually ones taking away the priceless little of grain that folks in the village had that was taken as p*****t for tax when gold coins were not forthcoming. There was talk that word had reached the pharaoh of a band of bandits who refused to pay tax and would tell others to do the same. Whispers had it that a search party and counter force was sent to the neighboring village were I had left behind a few short months ago, and they were being stationed there awaiting another party that is to come from the direction of kaipur, and with a syncopated attack from both ends, were tasked to root out all who dared as much as speak ill of the pharaoh.   Trouble struck in our kitchen when lizzy was reaching up above the cupboard for a potato basket and the stool on which she stood, slid from under her and she fell badly on her left side. I must have heard the thud from my hut, but her shrieks of pain definitely sounded across the empty spaces of sand towards and fearing the worst I leapt up and ran to her breathless.   Looking eastward through the hills you could see a flash of light and then karim was standing by the fire at the back of the the house. It was really a fire mound on which most of the cooking and around which much of the late evening conversations were held. Something of a command center or liaison office outdoors. The view from the hills would have been breathtaking in better lighting conditions. It was already well past sunset and as to where karim had appeared from was a bigger question. Several ages of science and even greater years of spirituality had always tried to explain or experience teleporting, time travel or any kind of otherworldly movement through time and space that defied common conceptions of being held in time. Some have some to the conclusion that time exists only for the beholder, others have held to spatial limitations but convinced of layers of existence in the “spirit world”, with several variations marked like the readings on a vial for measurement in between. Karim was not a particularly devout person, at least not in this dimension. He seemed to be able to remember the past, even further than the average leather tanner with legends of the past and a prouder family history in craftsmanship, his was a vision of a past life. A life in which he was sure, no most certain that he had existed. With a father, with a mother, and two sisters. He hadn’t quite remembered being of age in such a time, at least he hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason he was almost always a young boy whenever his visions of the past life hubbled around. Truth is in such a life he hadn’t lived past his teenage years, but he shuddered to think of an untimely death in the youthful years of a past life. All he knew is for some reason yet unknown to him, he was given a second chance, or maybe a third even, at life and without being aware he had managed to successfully parade the lands and put his mark on the map. As a tanner he wasn’t well much more known than his father had been, a local village folk hero though he was, and even less so as an evader of time and space, with an ability to travel at an unreal speed across vast distances in an instant. At first he only timeported in his current dispensation, unaware the past was accessible not just as a memory. But traveling back in time after having been fully incorporated in the present era, poses not only a risk of upsetting the balance and advance of events, should you decide to use present knowledge to impact events of the past but it posed the risk of toppling the balance of time and space as it exists, with implications hitherto not fully understood.   Running across the desert sands, trying to evade land mines, remind me a running from camelback nomads and desert storms Face down in the sand, decrepit, feeling like the life has been beaten out of me, starvation tugging at my insides , a wild wind blowing away from the hut, taking with it all the sand and dust that it could, you would think it was in a hurry to dig a grave. Was it my grave. Barrage stood over me, g*n in hand, wondering why he shouldn’t just shoot me and get it over with. He was a friend of my father but had never once felt obliged. I guess it was the bad blood from the 80’s. when the local gangs were at odds and his cousin was killed in a g*n clash with my father and his crew. But here I stood, or lay to be exact. Thinking I should be pleading for my life. Except I wasn’t, that’s when I thought back, to what seemed like a past life, my days in the sand, under a much more composed nature, a different time, a different society a different circumstance but still feeling much like me. Barrage wasn’t alone, his two cronies had circled to the back of the hut to survey for others. They knew I had a girlfriend for one, and a dog. But where were the two. No where to be found.   If these sands could tell their story, a story of thousands of years, of cowards and of brave men. For thousands of years trekking across the desert sands. The silk roads.   Although my story began in the sands, there once was a time when even these very sands weren’t a part of this area. Green was the color. A jungle out there. Animals, rivers, trees, shrubbery, savannah that was as green as it was wet. Then the pharaoh and his bride, not being content with teachings of RA, decided it was time for him and his people to follow a different God. A god of plenty but a God of great weather all year round. Trouble is the high priest anuk was a devout support of RA, as it had been the teachings of RA that saved his life from one of frivolity and decadence and gave him new meaning and fulfillment, so the high priest devised a plan to give the pharaoh and his bride what they wanted but without the comfort of the shield from RA, and the wrath of Ra was poured out on the earth and it scorched the earth and left a vast desert in its wake. My father was merely a leather tanner in a small village outside the city, where we lived, my mother and two sisters, one older and one younger. Sandwiched by the girls is what my father always joked saying. I should always stay in the middle of any affairs with girls, never agreeing totally or disagreeing. He said life was easier that way. He didn’t laugh much but when he did he had a haughty laugh and one so infectious you couldn’t help joining in with him. But in the last year of my rite of passage at the time around the winter solstice, there was nothing to laugh about. The corn of the summer was eaten by a band of locusts and a disease of the rot. Food was rationed and if that was not enough, there was contamination of the main river and two wells from which most our drinking water came from. My mother was very much against it but my father decided to send me off to a neighboring village to seek board and to give a message to a one called sanga. Upon my arrival in the city of a long journey by foot, I found a kind hearted lady by the well and asked her where I might find one called sanga. She looked at me surprised and asked what business do I, a little boy of less than 13 yrs, have with the most notorious band robber this side of the great river. I replied that I had no business with him but I had been given a message from my father. She asked who might my father be and when I replied she said she hadn’t heard of him. I smiled and said he was just a small leather tanner in my village but he was known there. Despite leaving for my journey just before dawn I had to make an overnight rest twice on the way, sleeping in treetops and foraging berries as the ration of bread and olives had by now been a forgotten nourishment. I reached the neighboring village around sunset the third day and the kind hearted lady had been tending to a matter with her daughter and her soon to be husband, so was late to the well on this particular day. She asked where I was staying and offered me a barn yard cot and a cup of milk if I needed to stay the night as sanga lived much further into the village and it was rumored spent most times with his g**g of thieves, lurking for unsuspecting and defenseless travelers on the route to kaipur, the city of oils, on the other side of the village. I reluctantly stayed the night as I feared there was more to her than met the eye. I hardly slept a peep when a little before dawn I was awoken by the sound of movement in the barn. Two horses entered the doorway and I could just see that one had a lady and the other a tall man of a very strong built. At around this time I heard madam shouting for me to come around to the house if I was awake. in my slow getting up I noticed the lady on the horse was being very quiet and as she turned around and saw me, she obviously of a frightened temperament, gave a shriek of shock and horror and it was at this point that I realized what they came for. Through all this time the man having dismounted his horse before I was called on by madam was making a furious but quiet attempt at wrestling what must have been a treasure chest open to reveal its contents. Before I could guess what might be worth the trouble he spun and looked at me, and realizing I was just a little boy, decided just to wait for me to exit the barn, albeit very timidly as I was unsure what would happen as I drew closer to the two bandits.   Sanga was less of the man I had expected him to be but it was clear that his legend preceded him and was very present everywhere he went. For some unexplained reason he decided I should not leave his company until I was safely back home with my father and although the message had been for him to find use for me until I was to be apprenticed, he kept reassuring me that soon I would be back in the safe and loving hands of my family. I was always good at math, even better than my bigger sister I would like to think, so he put me in charge of counting the herd every morning and evening. There was a herd of cattle that must have been over 500, and I would hate to think that they were all stolen. Of course cattle was the only legitimate thing that sanga owned and there were whispers that his beloved Conchita was the soon to be wife of a carpet maker who made the erroneous choice of coming out this way, where sanga could steal his bride.