Paulo Coelho

I feel inordinately hot and weary. Drops of warm and clear sweat trickle down my temples, releasing their salt in my mouth. I am exhausted. I have been running for so long, they seem ages of endless marathon. And this hallway doesn’t seem to reach to an end. I enter one room after another; all furnished with old furniture, some Louis something, that smell like old maidens’ homes, lace, mold and mice excrement. My knees go soft and I am lying down to find some sweet and well-deserved abandon in a tiny bed that seems brought from Alice’s wonderland. The Lilliputian bed doesn’t hold my gargantuan weight, and collapses under me, opening up into a bottomless well. I am falling, screaming silently, with no chance of holding onto anything. I hear myself hitting the ground, concocted of the finest and shiniest sand. I firstly get up on my knees, then I straighten by back and start walking. The thirst is my mistress, puppeteering me like an inanimate dummy while the sun is hitting my face, burning my lips and nostrils. I reach to a dry oasis, surrounded by brushwood and bleeding cacti. My salvation: a leather gourd, buried in the sand, shows its head. I’m browbeating to it and snatch it greedily. I start drinking avidly as if my entire life and world’s knowledge would be on the bottom of that gourd. My mouth gets filled with sand. I am chocking. Blinking in slow motion, I am looking down, while my hands, feet and entire body are turning into sand. I am melting down into a humble pile of powdery and resplended sand and become one with the desert. The desert is me. I am the desert.

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