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passed in much the same manner, and we pushed on into the night. When twilight fell, it was strangely beautiful, the purple shadows lengthening across the endless desert. Nowhere else in the world can one see how far light travels unimpeded, nor darkness. In the absence of the sun, the temperature dropped to bearable levels. Under a canopy of stars, we travelled onward, the spongy footfalls of the camels oddly silent on the desert floor, accompanied only by the rattle of our gear and our own soft breathing.
    At what hour I could not guess, Mek Timmur ordered camp made and in short order our tents were pitched, the camels staked for the night, kneeling under the stars and chewing meditatively on their measures of sorghum. I fell onto my own pallet and slept like the dead.
    And on the following day, we did it all over again.
    Terre d’Ange is a rich and fertile land. While I have travelled to many lands that made me long for home, never had I experienced any place so completely and utterly barren, lacking in all elements that sustain life. If we had not carried our own water, of a surety, we would have died in the first days. The heat and dryness was such that it leeched all moisture from the flesh. On the third day, we entered a sea of grey stone, locked into impossible waves and sculpted by the wind. And here the simoom blew, the killing wind of the desert. It was fortunate that we were not in the sands, where we would have had no choice but to wait out the windstorm, crouched beside the bulk of our camels and praying they would shelter us from the suffocating sands. As it was, it was bad enough, but we persevered, wrapping our faces in turbans, reemerging into the airless sea of ochre sand.
    Among us all, I daresay Imriel bore it the best, enduring the scorching heat with all the resilience of youth. At the end of the day, he alone had breath left for chatter; even Joscelin, with his Cassiline endurance, looked haggard and weary.
    On the fourth day, we reached the watering-hole.
    I had expected-oh, I don’t know, an oasis of sorts, shaded with palms, a small encampment surrounding it. ’Twas nothing of the sort, but a crater within the desert, flanked by tall cliffs and fantastically hot, lacking the least vegetation. The well was deep and plentiful, but ’twas true, the water was bitter and fit only for the camels, which drank it without harm. All about the floor of the valley, we saw the corpses of camels that had been pushed too hard and sickened and died in sight of water. I understood, then, a little better why Kaneka had been so particular in her choice of caravans. There are no scavengers in the desert-not even blowflies-and the skeletons of the camels were perfectly preserved, sand-colored hummocks, the hides parched and withered onto the bones.
    If the water was unsuitable for drinking, at least one could bathe in it, and this we did, filling a large copper basin brought for the purpose. I washed the airborne grit from every crevice of my body, rinsing my sand-caked hair and feeling several pounds lighter for it. Such was the heat that the water evaporated from my skin within minutes of my bath, leaving me cleaner but no less dehydrated for it. My hair, drying nearly as quickly, fair crackled with electric heat. I remembered ruefully the counsel I’d given Pharaoh’s wife, poor, simple Clytemne. Would that I’d had a salve of wool-fat on this journey!
    And then we were off again, boarding our lumbering, swaying camels, emerging from the baking shadows of the valley into the blazing wasteland. My lips parched and cracked, and I wet them sparingly with small sips from my water-skin. Only the heaps of dried camel dung at our resting-points gave evidence that anyone else in the world had passed this way-that, and the occasional corpse, the desiccated mounds of fallen camels.
    “You are sure,” I said to Kaneka at one point, my voice thin and cracking, “that this is the wisest route to Meroë?”
    “The wisest?” From under the shadow of her hood she looked at me, eyes dark and amused. “I never said it was the wisest, little one. But it is the shortest.”
    Yellow sand and basalt hills gave way to granite, grey plains and rugged hills laced with a vein of blue slate, an unexpected gift of color. It fed the imagination until one’s mind conjured lakes, vast lakes, blue and shimmering in the distance. The first such vision excited me and I urged my camel onward over the desert floor, imagining the