The Contraption

This tribe of desert nomads wear the strangest clothes, the strangest he had seen, with colors and shapes that swam before his eyes, but, strangest of all, so very tight, like skin, like the light sheen of sweat on his neck. His breath hard in his lungs, making speed.

And yet he was one of them. His contraption, like theirs, a marvel, racing at a terrifying pace, a moment's falter and sure disaster. The others filled the black flat tar path, but they were not alone: tested by other contraptions, large, fast, of many colors, all shining with an evil alchemic radiance, their distinctive smell, heat, smoke. Their names were far too sinister in retelling, too outlandish, and in years to come when he told children of the "nissan"and its speed they laughed in delight at the absurd and impossible, made even more ridiculous when he asserted - with all seriousness, ah Battuta, so funny so funny - that it was just one of the many different species of this beast.

Friday prayers had been abandoned for this journey; Battuta raced with these travellers in their endless circles, the wind fast in his face. Sweat formed and whisked away by the dry wind, now cooler with the end of summer. Beyond, the desert, always the desert, unbroken save for enormous plans, projects, dreams, even idiocies of the desert people, they who planned tall monuments to themselves, taller, ever taller, and off to the north the towers they had already built lined the sky, lit by the rays of dawn, spires cutting the wind from the Gulf into swirls and wisps.