Hamish there on golden fields which were not fields nor golden save in
the memories of those who could never possess them.
The flat plain was golden in the early light and vibrant, and thrumming
with the throats of rock and stone carved by winds and hands weathered
by winds and hands, feet, mouths, inceptions
of desires, all these things changed the land and the memory of it.
The flat plain was lifted up and borne down with the weight of it.
Countless, they were, the scarred and tubercular bones, the beads, the
bowls, but the roadways were laid out and led directly to the great, the
glorious structures which thrilled every sentient being with awe for their
majesty and a reverberant desire to partake of the power and the fascination.
Hamish stood upon the early plain with his coat unbuttoned and the collar
of his shirt ready for the soft touch the 1st breath of day before the
fire and white heat which did so much to illuminate the tunnels and the
caverns and turned their adornments into jewels
of revelation and so little
for the tissues which were not on walls or below them but upon the bones
of humans.
Hamish
lifted his face, his young face, toward the aquamarine sky still, unmarred,
where a peregrine timed the curling air. Hamish, you
see, Cleo indicated with a curl of 1 finger's end, had all the world before
him, and all of adventure, and all of life, and he let exist the lion tawny,
the ochre, the rich sienna and the secret umber of ageless desert cliffs
holding many names and possessing far more these magnificent cliffs with
their trails, caverns, tunnels, fistulae
and umbilicals, their record,
their murk,
their frankincense,
and
their murders.