There was a war on, but then, there was always a war on in the desert.

I may have been journeying for a few days or a few months, I really had no way of knowing. However long it was, it was just time enough to imprint the fiery oranges and fuchsias of the dune sunsets into my dreams, so that there was no escape from the desert, even in sleep. I misspeak. A 'journey'� would denote that I was on my way from somewhere to somewhere else. Truth was, there was nowhere left to be journeying from and no place left to be arriving at. Nobody wanted nor missed a thief. I was simply trying to stay out of the way.

My goal was to lose myself in the vast nothingness, away from the fighting, away from people, and yet stay alive for as long as I cared to. I would have gladly parted with my body there in the dunes, but there was a part of me that feared that were I to die just then, death would be nothing but an eternal desert twilight'beautiful, blinding, and panic inducing. I was already living in hell, but being alive it seemed somehow less permanent. So I kept going.

At first I thought it was a mirage. Of course, I had expected the mirages. I prepared myself for the inviting pools of intangible water, welcome relief in the spectral form of a horse, or a well, or an apple or a beautiful and preferably naked woman. I longed for some brief glimpse of a reality other than fire and desert grit and pain and thirst and solitude. I had not expected a lone, cubic, three-story building the color of sand, surrounded by nothing but sand, my sun blindness blurring its edges so it seemed part of the desert itself. And I had not expected laughter, coming from young boys the color of sand, dressed in sand, playing in the sand. This was no mirage. I had in fact crossed from one hell to the other. I had become one with the dunes. I lay down and willed them to take me quickly.

And I dreamed of darkness. And I dreamed of a cool breeze. And I awoke to both.

***

The sand-boys were as real and solid as I was. In the days that followed my eyes slowly healed, and my body was revived by their constant generosity. They were, in fact, all the color of sand, even their eyes'whether by birth or as a result of their environment I never knew. And they were all boys. Boys of every age, the eldest of whom appeared to be in late adolescence, the youngest maybe four or five years old. The sand-cube structure housed them all, a refuge from the harshness of the desert extremes for the unlikely fraternity that spent its days and nights within its walls.
The room I awoke in could just as soon have been one from a palace on the coast. The stone walls and the gaping bed I was laid upon were draped with tapestries woven in deep scarlets, indigos and golds. A breeze from the window cooled my head and brought with it none of the strangling aridness of the desert, but rather shadows of forests and oceans and rainy nights. It was as if those walls shut out not only the desert sand but also any evidence that the menacing dunes existed at all. I rested a great deal, and I gradually regained my health.

Ishmael, one of the eldest, spent long hours by my bed during the time of my recovery. He was not at all talkative, though he was outwardly interested in my progress. Naturally curious about my rescuers I would repeatedly ask him questions only to be met by frustratingly cryptic responses.
To my 'why's he'd answer,
'We are here to teach and we are here to learn.'
To my 'how's,
'One who cannot learn does not arrive. One who does not learn does not depart.'
One evening during supper, he interrupted me,
'Simeon, there are no questions that cannot be answered, but no man truly wants all the answers.'

While I longed to convince him that, yes, I did want all the answers, I could not bring myself to speak. If Ishmael, who very rarely spoke as it was, had withdrawn from the conversation, then who was I, as his guest, to press the matter? So I went on not knowing, and relying on observation alone to assuage my curiosity.

The boys called themselves the Learning. Those who were smaller and more childlike called themselves the Young, those resembling adolescents referred to themselves as the Elder, and they addressed each other only by first name. The house and its inhabitants formed a manner of self-governing school, all of the boys having something specific to teach those younger than themselves. After what may have been hours, days or weeks, I was fully, or at least mostly, recovered, and being that I appeared similar in age to the eldest of them, I was readily welcomed into the daily rituals of the house. From the Elders I learned the secrets of reading the stars, and fell in love with the desert nights, for we spent them, not cowering from the dust or the scorpions but laying on cots atop the school crafting stories and legends from the figures that danced above us. From the young ones I learned how to create color from the desert, and when my vision was no longer plagued by sun blindness, I clearly saw their art, over every interior wall. Paintings, tapestries and murals, crafted with shades and hues I never knew existed, seemed almost alive when played upon by the desert sun shining through the windows. I learned the magic of language, of science and the symmetry of the Universe. I still shivered with memories of war and hunger in the desert, but for most of my waking hours, and they were all waking hours, those memories were dimmed by the irresistible ocean of Knowledge before me.

As time progressed, however, my initial sense of euphoria was gradually replaced by unrelenting curiosity and then concern. I began to feel that perhaps I had left my old, certain earth, and had stumbled across some rift in natural existence. I was not dead, indeed I was very much alive, but nothing amidst the Learning made sense. Feasts fit to invoke the envy of kings lay before us each day, but no matter how much I ate, I never felt satisfied. When one of the Elders retired at night, the rest followed, and when they retired, they, in fact, disappeared, leaving no one in the house but the Young and myself, who never felt the need for sleep, and passed the brief night mixing colors in the dark. Every so often, at the breakfast table, there was one less Elder than the day before, and, replacing him, one new Young whose sandy eyes held an expression between nervousness and fear. No one ever so much as whispered of the Elder gone missing, but embraced the new Young as if he had been there all along. Yet these occurrences were but ripples in the inexplicable waves of dread that crept closer with each passing day.

On the day that Ishmael did not show up for breakfast, I could no longer question silently. I pushed my chair aside and pounded my fist on the table.

'I demand to know where the elders disappear to at night! We don't sleep. I eat but can hear the grumble of my stomach somewhere in the back of my mind. I have never felt so alive and so...un...human'�'

Ah, I thought. So it is. Perhaps I was dead. Had I awoken to find myself in a sandy purgatory of scholarly deities? The thought stuck in my throat but my mouth was still speaking.

'Where do the new Young come from and how do they get here? And, I raised my voice to a scream in desperation, I demand to know where Ishmael has gone and how he has gone and why!'

One of the Elders stood across from me and addressed me with a sharp glare and a calm tone.

'You are not one of us, Simeon, you are our guest. We did not ask for you but we have welcomed you. You have no right to demand anything of us. If you were one of the Learning you would understand without being told. Ishmael has been taught and has taught all that one needs to know, and goes knowing into a new life. Do not concern yourself with him. I assure you he is beyond content.'

He returned to his chair, and as usual following an Elders response to my questions, I could not bring myself to say anything further. As I sat back down, trying to reconcile my mind to the idea of not-knowing, my eyes caught those of that morning's new boy, and I gasped. In all my time there, every one of the Learning was of the same color skin, hair, eyes'the color of sand. This boy had eyes blue as the ocean, which seemed ready to rage with a similar storm. Clear, piercing, deep and troubled. He looked at me and through me and we understood each other. He, like I, was different. Looking at him, I could feel my thoughts toward my saviors change. I felt resentment instead of gratefulness. What curiosity I had left was replaced with fear and distrust. Restlessness replaced any sense of comfort I had possessed before that point. It was as if the storm in those wild blue eyes pulled me into its churning and after all my months spent in the house with the Learning, I made up my mind that it was time to leave. I just wished I knew where I was.

***

The boy with the blue eyes was named Lucas, and he found me a few days later after dusk when the elders had retired a bit earlier than usual.

'You're Simeon.'

He marched over to the window of my room where I was cleaning the telescope that rested there.

'I am.'

Lucas examined me in silence for sometime, before he tentatively spoke.

'I know you want answers. I know you want to leave. I can see it in your eyes. If you promise to help me, I'll tell you how we can be free of this place. I want nothing to do with their art and their knowledge and their secrets and their imprisonment. I didn't choose to come here.'

'How did you come to be here?' An answer maybe. Any answer.

'The same way as all the rest. I fell asleep in my house by the coast, with my dog at the foot of my bed and the sound of mother's singing carrying through the curtains, and the salty ocean breeze rocking me to sleep, and I woke up to a dry air and a hot bed and went to breakfast because I knew that's what I was supposed to do. Don't you see, Simeon. When you're the Learning, each movement or decision you make you do so because it is what you know to do, but You don't know, and I don't want to know. There's only one way out, and we'll need to make that journey together.'

Different thoughts and questions raced through my mind, but there was nothing else to say to this, so I agreed.

'There's a door,' he motioned me to sit on the floor with him and whispered, 'in the library of the house, that leads to a staircase stories and stories deep. On each level, terrible punishments stand ready for anyone who tries to escape this place and who gets distracted. At the foot of these stairs the creature Rabisu awaits, a hideous demon, a beast, ready to pounce on and devour any boy strong enough to descend the stairs and stupid enough to journey to the bottom. If you can escape the beast you're free, and you return home. No man has ever eluded Rabisu's attack. But we are but boys and a good deal more clever than men.' His blue eyes shone.

'Why, then, are more not openly frightened, or even, at best, discontent?'

His answer was one I had by now grown accustomed to.
'You are not one of the Learning, Simeon. There is much you don't know.'

It was only a brief moment in which I considered the choices before me, but I had nothing else to say to this, so I agreed, and we found our way to the Library in the dark.

***

Books upon books, star charts, telescopes, tapestries depicting stories of heroes and legends, maps, protractors, abacuses and more books balanced themselves in precarious piles amidst the cobwebs and shadows of the darkened room. The library had always stood apart from the stark orderliness that characterized the rest of the house. It was never used as a place of study, but simply a storehouse of knowledge that reeked of dust, stale air and antiquity. The boy and I made our way through the shelves and stacks to a clearing in the far corner of the room. He muttered something I did not understand and motioned to the wall before us, which opened, revealing a thin wooden staircase shrouded in cool blackness. I wondered that I was not more apprehensive about the journey before us. I was frightened. I was, in fact, terrified of what lay beyond that musty library, but my feelings of captivity had grown almost to a choking, an asphyxiation, and like most imprisoned animals, Lucas and I were prepared to battle hell for a chance at our freedom.

We started down the stairs, the boy leading, slowly at first, then almost at a run as our eyes became accustomed to the dark. The shock of light from the first opening sent us staggering, and we cowered in the shadows waiting to confront whatever punishment awaited us. But nothing happened. The opening in the staircase revealed a cavernous room'or was it a room?'as bright and as warm as if the sun itself was shining there stories under the desert sand. Fruit trees and nut trees spread in all directions in perfectly manicured rows, and a clear, inviting creek babbled cheerfully in and out between the trunks.

The tree closest to me held oranges ready to burst with cool, refreshing juice. And reaching, I started to step off the landing, but Lucas shook me out of my reverie.

'Cant you see it's a trap, Simeon. A mirage to lure you off your journey.'

But it didn't feel like a trap, it didn't look like a mirage. He pulled me with him as we continued to descend.

The second opening was even more mesmerizing than the first. Flowers vined their way around the bases of fountains and through trellises that shaded benches and pathways. I heard voices off behind yards of roses, and I heard something I had not heard since I left civilization to wander through the desert. I heard the singing of birds.

Again Lucas had to take my hand and guide me further down the stairs. He kept hold of me as we descended further and further into the seemingly endless abyss. As we ran, what lay beyond the openings passed before my eyes, not in concrete images but in flashes. I saw kitchens overflowing with vegetables and meats and spices. I saw an expanse filled with nothing but endless stacks of books. I saw glimpses of boys lounging on couches of velvet with pillows of golden thread. I saw more gardens. I heard music echoing through the caves. I felt I had seen and heard secrets more beautiful than Knowledge itself. And then it stopped.

We stood before the door in the blackness, our hearts throbbing from fear and winded lungs. Lucas whimpered softly and stepped behind me, showing weakness for the first time since he found me in my room that night. My mind was racing with questions. We had seen no punishment, in fact we had seen only beauty. We had felt no torture. We had felt waves of peace and enlightenment, and yet continued to run in fear. We had arrived at the bottom of the abyss with no repercussions other than exhaustion. Was it possible there was, in turn, no beast? We stood there, boy and thief, Learning and guest, for a minute or an hour, I really had no way of knowing, my hand on the doorknob and our breath the only sound.

A light appeared from behind me and I turned to the boy, seeking refuge in those aquiline eyes, but the light came from different eyes'not ocean, not sand, but fire'and they grinned a knowing, superior grin. They looked at me and through me. I called to Lucas, opened the door and took off running, first through soil, then small stones, then the beloved desert sand. No beast grabbed my ankles and pulled me down. No demon caught me with its dripping claws. I ran until my lungs could run no further and I fell prostrate into the desert in weary relief. I kissed the ground, pressing my body to the dunes and running my fingers through the cold night sand. I felt none of the cloudy euphoric stupor I felt at the school. I felt hungry and tired and cold. I did not feel like a guest and a scholar. I was Simeon'refugee, vagabond, thief. I was lost. I was unwanted. I was free.

I turned to Lucas to exalt in our escape, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. I followed my footprints through the sand the way I had come, but I saw no footprints in the sand other than my own. I came upon no small rocks, no soil, no door, no staircase, no school. There was nothing there in the dunes but myself and the first orange rays of sunrise. In the distance I heard shouts and the steady drum of horses hooves, and I walked in the opposite direction. After all, there was a war on. But then, there is always a war on in the desert.

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