Tales From the Gobi Desert
British International School Shanghai Puxi, Alistair Choo, Fiction: Group 3
S
and. Endless, golden dust. A place where dreams have been buried under Pyramids, tombs
and catacombs. Riches guarded by the dead, the mummified. And exploited by the greedy,
the stupid. Greed. A corruption. A disease. So avarice shall start our story.
“Dig.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“No.”
Two silhouettes stood on a dune with a laserdisc of a sun sheltering them from the night. One
shadow was crouched on the sand, the other standing upright with his bulging arms crossed over
his bulging pecs. All made of pure, hard-earned muscle of course.
“Dig.” Said the upright shadow.
“No, Klaus.” replied the crouched one to the rough voiced man who blackened the shadows
with his bulk. The upright man struck the kneeling mortal.
“You shall do well to remember this lesson, Simon.” The buff man rumbled, low, droning and
deep. He rubbed the back of his hand tenderly with his four fingers. Simon appeared to swear
something, and a frightening crack echoed across the plains of Egypt. Simon held his nose in
shock. Blood seeped through his fingers and pain was taking its time like a poison. Numb at first,
Simon’s nose began to warm to the feeling of being broken and bloody. Only fear kept him from
screaming out.
“Dig.” repeated the buff man, wiping the blood off his knuckles. The stiff moustache, steely
squint and chest-out posture made Simon aware that more pain was to come from this man’s
fist. Reluctantly, Simon picked up the shovel that his opposition had thrown down between them
earlier, and Simon plunged the end of the spade into the sand, and levered the wooden handle
to pull up the fluid gold. With the darkening sky and wind constantly blowing more sand on
to replace the lost, he’d die buried under the sand like all the treasures he’d been forced to find.
Simon looked at his employer, a man named Klaus. Dressed up like a proper explorer, with khaki
uniform and one of those hats that was somewhere between a bowler hat, a hard hat and a cap,
complete with a manly moustache – the kind that was thick on the lip, but thinned out at the
ends – that grasped onto the man’s face like a dying caterpillar, relentless on it’s last wish to hold
on to life. And muscles so vast that it was perceived to be an ocean, with the simplest movement
making waves so catastrophic that faces in the vicinity would’ve been ground to nothing but
a blunt instrument. He perceived himself as a gentleman, thinking that it was refined with all
of their convoluted sentences, and constantly tried and failed to follow the English stereotypes.
Scones and tea at five o’clock sharp every day, immaculate clothing, memorizing all of the
different sayings.
“Say, old boy, how goes the excavation?” Klaus looked up from his newspaper after shuffling
into a more comfortable posture from his reclined position. Simon looked up at Klaus.
“Well, let’s recap shall we?” Simon coughed. He threw the shovel into the ground. “You
abducted me from a highly respected museum of Egyptology in Cairo, flew me here, in the middle
of nowhere, made me dig with a garden shovel, just to try and find a place that just might exist.
