(no subject)
The ocean swallowed their ships and spit the bones back splintered and stripped, so they turned their backs to its cold depths and claimed manifest destiny over the slumbering continent. But the desert was an ocean in its own right, a land of dunes shifting in tidal winds and thunderstorms as wild as any white capped tempest, and the rumbling wagon wheels woke its ancient fury. By day the sun baked the cracked earth until skin blistered and bruised, while night brought a chill which burned like ice crystals frozen in bone marrow, expanding to crack internal fissures. They spoke very little, mouths parched and tongues bloated, yet all around them the desert murmured its mockery in jackal cries, copperhead rattles, the squabbling of vultures over a sun dried carcass. At the crown of each rise they lifted their hands to their eyes in foolish hope but still the desert stretched out in all directions to the horizon, a sea of dried river valleys and striped sandstone monoliths rippling in the heat. When the last burdened beast collapsed and they could no longer budge the weighty wagons, they gathered in the vehicles' paltry shade and burned dried dung fires day and night to ward off the wilderness.