Declare

not arranged into the usual long, regular lines; the northern faces were as steep as the sand grains would permit, and even in the stillness Hale could see patches of paler rose-colored sand appear as here and there the darker surface layer slid silently away.
    A spot of still darker red bounded rapidly across the high crest of the nearest dune, right under the empty blue sky—it was a fox, running with apparent purpose—and the dark sand was falling behind the animal like a curtain sequentially dropped, exposing the rose underlayer—
    —and suddenly the air throbbed with a loud roar like the harmonizing engines of a low-flying bomber. Hale flinched on his saddle at the sheer physical assault of the noise, and it was several seconds before he recognized the old rhythms—and then several seconds more before he realized that the drumming cycles were forming vast, slow words in a very archaic form of Arabic.
    It was all Hale could do not to throw himself off of the high saddle and lie face-down in the sand—for the cyst of his own frail identity felt nearly negated by this “mountain, or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ad” that was shaking the foundations of the world with its speech.
    His stunned consciousness recognized the words for Why come the sons of Solomon son-of-David to the Kingdom of A’ad? —and he knew that no creatures who might in some sense survive here would know the term Nazrani . Their city had been destroyed by the wrath of Yahweh, the God of Solomon, long before Jesus of Nazareth was born.
    Neither Hale nor bin Jalawi ventured an answer; and the eight imperturbable camels simply kept plodding forward toward a low gap in the sand between the dunes.
    From the corner of his eye Hale saw another fox scampering across the ridge of the towering quaid dune that blocked the blue sky a hundred yards to their right. And as the ringing tones of the first dune shuddered away to silence this one took up the throbbing, rhythmic roar, repeating the same question.
    Don’t answer , Hale told himself, mostly to maintain his own distinct identity, as he rocked numbly on the saddle. Don’t reason with them.
    With a jarring thump that was almost drowned out by the syllables of the dunes, a geyser of sand shot hundreds of feet into the air from a point two hundred yards to the left; and as the upflung sand column began to dissolve into falling veils, another exploded up from the right. Abrupt collapses and avalanches in the slopes of two of the quaid dunes ahead made Hale think that similar detonations were happening under their weighty mass, and when he stared through the foggy rain of sand at the spot where the second geyser had erupted, he saw an age-weathered ring of stone exposed in the sand. It was a well. The wells of Wabar were violently expelling the sand that must have choked them for more than two thousand years.
    A quarter of a mile away to the left, another dune began pronouncing the resonant question, and more tan jets burst up from the desert floor on all sides, out across the plain to a distance of half a mile or more. Hale’s nostrils twitched at a smell like cinnamon and old dry blood.
    He was gritting his teeth, and tears were running from his slitted eyes into his beard. They might not know the term Nazrani, he thought, but I am baptized. Is that what this dead kingdom is responding to, that spiritual polarization? Old St. John Philby came here—but only after he had renounced his own baptism and converted to Islam.
    He pushed the jangled thought away, unwilling to consider the notion that his baptism—“on the Palestine shore, at Allenby Bridge near Jericho”—might have made an important and recognizable change in him; and in any case he had more immediate urgencies.
    Bumpy black objects as big as wrecked cars were rising out of the wells now, hovering in ripples of mirage over the masonry rings and glinting in the sun; Hale saw that they were made of stone, and when one of them, and then another, ponderously leaned to the side, the rim of its well was instantly crushed to an explosion of dust, and the black stones moved slowly forward, leaving behind them paths of deeply indented sand. A harsh, two-tone ringing had started up, as if in harmony with the repeated slow basso profundo syllables of the dunes.
    Half a dozen of the black basalt rocks still floated heavily over their wells, but eight of the massive things—no, ten—more—were surging across the plain toward