New Tales of the Gobi Desert
St. Joseph’s College, Kam Chun Hao Jacky, Fiction: Group 4
H
e grabbed a handful of the substance. ‘It surely feels like sand, but…‘
He gazed at the substance as it sparkled. ‘Is it not grey?’ The human, dressed in a
silly leafy costume, uttered to himself, as he stood in the middle of what the creatures
called ‘the Gobi Desert.’
The concrete ground was more silent than ever. Here and there, grey men lay lifelessly, with
tears of regret in their decolorized eyeballs. Up in the dull grey sky, grey smog, heavy as rock,
was barely driven by weak gusts. Everything was motionless, when suddenly – ‘Whoosh!’ A plane
screamed as it penetrated through a ‘rock,’ leaving strands of grey air clinging onto its wings. It
was not any other airplane, but a military plane, a grey military plane.
‘This is Nesofy Veltal, General of the Air Force, speaking.’ A middle-aged man spoke on the
microphone to the soldiers on the military plane. ‘We have just defeated the planes of China, and
are now over Hong Kong. We expect to arrive in Madagascar in thirteen minutes, to get the last
fossil fuels.’
‘Hurry up!’ another man’s cry projected from the speaker.
‘We must win this World War. We must take this last bit of energy on this earth for ourselves!’
The General, along with other soldiers on the plane, began dressing up in ghillie suits, to disguise
themselves as bushes when they arrived in Madagascar.
Bump! Bump! All of a sudden, the airplane shook violently.
‘What’s wrong?’ the General yelled at a soldier, piloting the plane.
‘A super tornado came out of nowhere, and is approaching us!’ screamed the shivering soldier,
as he tried to take control of the plane.
‘Curse climate change!’ the angry General murmured, watching the tornado approach, through
the window of the plane.
‘Curse humans…,’ a mysterious lady’s voice added. The General looked around him in shock.
All the soldiers on the plane were men, and were busy dealing with the tornado. Neither did they
speak, nor did anyone hear the words besides him.
‘Oh my God!’ The pilot screamed, which interrupted the General’s thinking. The plane shook
more fiercely than ever, when it was dragged into the super tornado. The General desperately
sought something to catch hold of, but failed. His body was thrown violently to the ceiling of the
plane, head first. ‘Ah!’ he yelped, then everything became black…
The first thing the General felt was the severe pain on his head, then he realized he was lying
on something soft. Struggling in pain, the General managed to get up, and open his eyelids. He
was in the middle of nothing, yet the most beautiful ‘nothing,’ for he couldn’t see even a tiny
patch of dull greyness, except for his grey ghillie suit. Strangely enough, all other soldiers had
disappeared and he was no longer on the plane. He began to wander, hoping to find an exit.
As he strolled, he took a deep breath to calm himself. Surprisingly, the air was so fresh that it
tasted sweet. Astonished by the magic of this place, he began glancing at the scenery around him.
The landscape was separated into two distinct monochromatic parts by a distinct line.
‘The sky is so “non-grey,”’ he thought, as he couldn’t think of another word to describe the
greyness of the sky, ‘and the lower part as well, but in a different way’. He began to grow curious
