©2004 Jeff Percifield
Barbaric Yawp 2004

 

 

 

CITIES OF DUST

 

          …a hot wind off the desert, a simoom of Syria, Arabia, North Africa, that cracked lips and parched lungs and howled in the night, it wailed through uneasy dreams and seared the unconscious, and at dawn the world trembled with a hallucinatory clarity as the hot wind lifted up the clouds and blew them away, exposing the cities of the South – Athens, Rome, Marseilles – to a fierce eye burning in a white-hot sky…

          …and then the sand, at first a spray of grit that peppered windshields and stung the cheeks and wormed its way into eyes so that people staggered and swiped at pale faces that chapped in the wind, and then it came, boiling across the sea, an ecstasy of sand that churned and seethed like maddened horses, and people looked up and were struck dumb by the fury of the sand and its majesty, orange and yellow and pearl, and then it was upon them…

          …some laughed, some swore, some thrilled to the power of the sand, children clapped! their hands when they closed the schools and people shook their heads good-naturedly because they were not afraid of the sand, their cities stood firm in the rocky earth, their lives ran along well-oiled grooves, and it was not so much after all to close the door on the operatic winds, to make a cup of tea and marvel at the obscure music of the sand, and when people woke after a restless night and it was not gone they shrugged and children stood at windows and beheld a desiccated snow, sinuous arabesques slithering across the pavement, hissing like vipers, and the sand swept inland…

          There has never been such a thing, the young people said, but the old ones clucked and said, Yes there has, but it was long ago…

          …it fanned out across the land, it darkened the skies over Prague and Vienna, it stormed against the mountains so that rock and sand strove against each other, and in the valleys they heard otherworldly shrieks, they beheld flashes of light on the heights, but finally the sand prevailed, and it thundered down the slopes towards the lowlands, it fell upon the forests of Burgundy and Bavaria where thousand-year-old trees swayed and broke, it sucked the moisture out of the air so that knuckles cracked and peeled and dried blood coagulated in the fissures and turned to rust, and there was a smell of cinnamon and sulphur, and grains of sand caught in tiny places and the lights began to stutter and go out…

          …in Russia, too, it blew up off the steppes and there was sand and chaos in Moscow and Kiev, explosions of sand that knocked people off their feet, balls of sand igniting overhead and buildings shook and the nation trembled at this plague out of the empty lands, the ascetic sand that lay waste to everything in its path, and there was a smell of ashes and saffron, and people shook their fists and said, Who will stop the sand?d?

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          We donned long robes to keep out the sand, we went about stooped and hooded, afraid to raise our eyes to the burnt sky, we turned on the taps and sand poured out, women keened and groaned and gave birth to damp mummies of sand, and a hot burning rain fell upon Amsterdam and the flesh-sellers erupted in boils and chancres, seared by the sand, and in a fine old building in Brussels they convened a conference about the sand where papers were read and scholars spoke about the meaning of the sand and politicians appealed to the sand and bureaucrats said we must number the sand, and there was much bickering and arguing and then the windows exploded and the sand burst into the chamber and people ran screaming and some were trampled and some they found later, in contorted unimaginable postures, their eyes gone, their mouths full of sand…

          …and across the narrow sea, the Scandinavians beat drums and made offerings and trembled at the rumor of the sand…

          …and it fell across the fens and waterways of England, and in London they looked up at the rain of sand and put up their English umbrellas, the sand collected in rills and ribbons in the cobbled streets, it wailed all night, eerie ululating calls that none could decipher, and in the dry dawn the fields were withered, the wheat-stalks flattened, the shore full of dead cod, as though the sand had the power to smite the loaves and fishes, and there was a reek of salt and wormwood, and dervishes of sand danced in the sky, a holy script upon the heavens, and when the setting sun peeped redly through the haze the sands in the upper airs glowed orange as if the world below were afire, burning in a sublime conflagration of sand…

          We shut the windows and drew heavy drapes to keep out the sand, we sat in sepulchral darkness contemplating a world full of sand, but some gave thanks and bowed their heads for the simple beauty of the sand, and artists painted canvasses of sand and poets sang about the sand and it was good…

          …but the sand did not respond to flattery, it beat at the coasts in great hammering fists, it collected in mountainous drifts and dunes and one by one the cities disappeared, it blew down the walls of Athens and flattened the rubble, and the canals of Venice became blowing corridors of sand, and in Rome the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square stood stark and stunned above a sea of sand, and in Paris the cloaked and humbled citizens wandered through blowing dunes, and Prophets appeared who said the Age of Sand was upon us and we must repent for we had worshipped vanity and provoked the sand which winnowed the souls and cleansed the land of trespasses…

…and it became finally a Continent of sand, the world entombed beneath a benediction of sand, and someday the righteous sand people of the new world would dig down and find our streets, our homes, ourd books still upon the tables, the clocks long-stopped, they would push aside the sand and find us seated at our desks, or groping for each other wherever we were when the sand rushed upon us, a civilization lost and dreaming beneath a holocaust of sand…

…and still the sand hungered, even though it had devoured a world, it drew itself up to a great height with ice and fire, and it contemplated the hammered sea which dared defy the sand, and it beheld far off in the West the wan and winking sunset, and then with great joy and wrath the sand thundered forwards to smite the sea, and to extinguish at last the red and smoking sun…