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The Dead Sea

 The parched voice calls out from the dark. It caries cracked, wizened words half lost in the desert wind like forgotten tombstones. I do not speak the language being spoken and so I let the words be dragged away into a night by the wind. Someone lies there as I pass. A skeletal thing that the dead might make to mimic the living. Corpse is generous. The thin body is almost just a sketch of limbs, of taut skin pulled over worthless bones, wind-blasted into living mummification by god only knew however many years adrift in the wastes. 


They speak again, louder this time. Yet the words are snatched up by an even fiercer gust. I do not look to their hollow, cratered face. I do not care for the sunken eyes that are black as little pools of night. I leave them. Following nothing. 


Sand and rock are omnipresent. They are the meaning of this place, the reason. In the dark of the night I weave between huge, wide-backed dunes. In the dark of the night I pass beneath stone spires so like petrified waves, their jagged sides long ago since turned smooth by wind. 


The wind howls. Screams. It is a roar upon a roar. So loud that in deafness and hissing silence I forget it is there just long enough to remember, struck dumb by its return.


An ocean lay here long ago. Long before man had his world, his gods. I feel it’s memory. Can scent salt as it rises and burns. Things shiver at the edge of my vision and I can sense vast bodies adrift just off in the darkness, just away from my path. Great looming leviathans too vast to care much for extinction and so they remain, unchallenged and impossible in the afterlife across so much sand, so much stone.

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