“Alright dad.” Ling nodded as he answered. He then packed a few clothes in his backpack. He
also took the water bottle with him. This would be a long journey. Ling thought to himself. Gazing
one last time at their home, Ling followed his father’s footsteps and slowly started off their venture.
The faint leaps of grasshoppers that hid among the bushes intermingled with the occasional
chirps of the few sand plovers which were difficult to notice among the dried twigs. As the night
displayed darker visions of tomorrow, they slashed through the dwindled leaves of the saltwort
which did not yield any blossom this year. From a distance, these bushes appeared like dull
shadows hanging among the sand dunes. Half woken, Yong opened his eyes only to find what
lied plain in front of him was a vast stretch of glittering sand. Almost like a reflex, Yong pulled
himself up and realized he was on a desert.
“Gobi Desert?” he could not really believe in what he saw.
But there he was, lying on a long piece of cold sand, glittering in soft yellow, with a blue
moon hanging low over his head, lending him welcoming smiles.
He strained his eyes, pinched his cheeks, and shook his head, only to bring him nowhere
else---he could only see a large desert under the dim moonlight which turned the sand dunes into
heaps of dark brown lumps over the horizon. Now that he had awakened from the dizzy swirling
journey, Yong confirmed his location on Gobi plateau. Swiftly, he recollected himself and searched
across the long undulating ground-line for signs of man just as a young Sherlock Holmes smelling
out any small piece of clues for his investigation. But there was plainly nothing, but a peaceful
stretch of sand, with quite a smooth surface, decorated with scattered but dried bushes, and from
time to time the low humming of the grumbling breeze which slashed over his sweating skin.
He took to his feet and tried to walk, suspecting that they might have been broken by the
swirling vertex that brought him there, imagining the need to find some broken pieces of plank
from the sand for bandaging his leaps, only to find that he could easily stand. He laughed
at himself---what city man mesmerized by detective stories and heroic actions. But then he
remembered his paint brush which was still tight in his hand. It was not a dream.
Yong could do nothing except to pull up his feet step by step across the sand, and for times he
needed to cover his nose and mouth with the lower skirt of his sweat-shirt to guard against the
sweeping sand in the wind.
He thought he was going nowhere as after almost an hour he could only find himself on the same
part of the world, with only a long stretch of dark and light brown soil. He began to feel worried.
“I am not going to die here, aren’t I?” he felt a bit tired. “How can those nomads stay live on
this land? I can’t feel nothing cool here. Come on! Any people here ----?” He called out loud over
the sand, and he could hear low echoes of his own voice dying out into far-away sand, still sand.
“Anybody answers me?” he called again and again. He looked to the far end of the dark
shadows and didn’t know for how long, he identified some dim bright light over the horizon, pale
at first and later becoming beams yellow, “Oh, it’s almost dawn.”
Sunrise over the desert was spectacular---the overwhelming darkness melting in a thin mist
of soothing purple suddenly surpassed by beams of bright glittering beams of gold, flickering on
the far edge of the desert, turning the stretch of sand into the Golden Fleece tempting the patience
of giants on Mt. Olympia. It was a moment of extraordinary peace. “What a view!” an unusual
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