"Sand. It was as if the air around us had pulverized itself into powder and was bent on driving itself through our bodies. Even in the relative shelter of the market quarter, winds of sand howled whirling, biting our faces, choking our lungs, clogging our eyes. In the noise and tumult we crouched down in a sheltered doorway.

I shouted over the shrieking wind:"We will have to wait it out, we are at least protected till the storm stops!!"

Sharazade shouted back, her face and hair already coated with sand: "No, this must be our chance to escape! Geosis is too small to hide us for long --" The screaming wind carried her words away for a moment. Across the abandoned bazaar, hastily abandoned boxes and jars rolled uncontrolled in the swirls of gusting sand. Shuttered windows battered against the frames of houses. We huddled against each other, waited for a lull. Then she began again, shouting in my ear as clearly as she could: "We should go ahead with the original idea! The other way back, across the desert! They can't follow us there, maybe!"

I yelled back: "This is crazy!! We can't even find our way across the street, let alone through a sandstorm!"

Then the wind died down for a moment. And then Sharazade showed something I had not seen in her before. She wiped the sand from her face, and shrugged her shoulders: "Oh, this, this is a minor storm. You forget that Cybania, may it rot, was a desert planet like this. " She stood up, and the wind hit her again, but she weathered it, her body determined. She thought for a second, and then bent back down and said: "Come on, we can do this. We need four things, and we need them fast."

"What?" I replied.

"We need some water, two of these Demershinnian drosbaack camels, and some mint tea."

I said:"Sharazade, are you out of your mind?"

"Look," she said, "we either do this, or we are in their clutches for good."

"Alright," I said, getting to my feet: "But what is the tea for? Isn't it a bit early for tea?"

The wind was picking up again. She reached back into her pilgrim's sack and pulled out a simple frock dress, which she then tore into large strips. "We need the water for us. We need the drossbaacks to ride when the storm drops a bit. And the mint tea is to saturate the cloths. We wrap the cloths around their faces, over their nostrils. The smell of the mint soothes the animals, keeps them from panicking. A little piece of Cybanian lore. And then --"

I interrupted. "But how are we going to get these things?"

She looked at me as if I did not know enough to wash the sand out of my ears. "Steal them, of course."

***********************************************

In spite of what she said, it was a horrible storm, as she admitted later. The drossbaacks were only occasionally spooked, but they were hard to drive against the wind, and we spent countless hours making almost no pace. On the third day, during a brief lull in the endless screaming wind, we came to a high dune, and in the greyyellow distance, we were unable to see the landmark we had counted on. We guessed, turned to what we hoped was the north, got lost again, and moved back into the resurgent storm. Much of the time we simply had to give up, and huddle in the leeside of the warm bellies of the drossbaacks, lying down wherever.

Although we knew that we were fighting for our lives out in that desert, I think she was in her element. She would hate me to say it, but it was a world she knew, and had fought to survive in once before, and had that in her bones.

After two more days, the water began to give out. The storm abated a bit, but we were in a trackless waste. And the storm would not blow out: it merely held its breath. We desperately needed at least a glimpse of the night sky to locate ourselves again. After another day, we began to lose hope that the sky would ever clear, that we would ever find water. We had only a few hours to live.

We had stopped, panting, to take a rest, hideously thirsty. Sharazad sat by me, and we held hands, and a faraway look came into her eyes, and she said: "I remember one of our older women, a fine strong woman, who was a Sufi mystic. One day when I was nearly dead, faltering from exhaustion, she took me aside and said to me: 'In Islam, we must pray and do our ablutions with water at scheduled times of the day and night. But what were we to do in the ancient times when we were out on caravan and found ourselves without water and far from any oasis? Then Allah, God, allows us to do our ablutions with sand. We cleanse ourselves with sand, when there is nothing else. We say that when the time comes that we find water, we will do them right. But in the meantime, sand. And she said to me: this is what you must do, child, this is the nature of hope in a barren land. For you, sand must be the promise of water to come.'"

Sharazade reached down, and in the middle of a world of sand, picked up a handful of sand, and placed it on her brow and down her face, as if she were washing herself in it, and let it cake and fall. She was praying, to Allah perhaps, to the God of the Sandstorm more likely.

The wind howled. The world shifted, sifted sand. I began to fall asleep, which I knew was dangerous, but we were becoming hypnotized by the endlessness of it all. The end was coming.

And then she gripped my arm. "Wait!" she said. "Why not?" I looked at her. She said: "You must be able to find water for us. You are half plant. You must have an instinct for it, somewhere."

I replied: "Well, I am certainly going brown and withering."

"No," she said, "I am not joking. You must have it in you somewhere. Have you never tried?"

I looked, I am sure, somewhat bewildered. "Well, no. I mean I always gravitate towards water, dream about it. But what would I do?"

She said, "I have no idea, I am not a plant. But there must be a way. You must be able to tap into that plantness. They used to call it a water witch on Cybania: there were people who could find water. We have nothing to lose. Why not empty your mind of the immediate desire for water, and see if anything happens?"

I think getting rid of the immediate desire for water was the hardest part. But I gave it a try. For someone whose mind had always been scholarly or at least academically inclined, it was hard to let go in that way, and there in a raging sandstorm, with the smell of drossbaacks in the nostrils, and the grit of impending death in the mouth. But I persevered, fighting the desire for water. And then after an hour or more of wavering, dropping to sleep, waking again, something odd happened: I had the growing sensation of entering down into a vast cavern below my mind, full of the sound of echoing dripping water, the beautiful haunting sound of echoing dripping water. When I came to the surface, I said in a mesmerized voice to Sharazade: "I do. I feel water. Vast caverns of it. I do."

She looked at me in hope. And then frowned. "That may be no use to us. You sense the aquifer, deep underground. Miles underground maybe. We need local water."

The wind around us howled. "Well," she said at last, "There is no help for it. We have nothing else. You must get up and walk towards the water. I will follow." We bundled up our provisions, and with the feeble strength I had in my limbs, I stumbled forward, trying to empty my mind, trying to reach out towards where water might be in this vast sea of sand. Sharazade, her face wrapped against the storm, led the drossbaacks along behind. We staggered through the descending darkness, leaning against the interminable wind.

Four hours later, exhausted, battered, a spring of water bubbled up into what was left of my mind. And moments later, we fell, all strength gone, into the blessed oasis.